Map 2

Irish place names starting with 'Kil'

Irish place names are predominantly derived from the Irish Gaelic language (Gaelige), reflecting the landscape, history, and culture of the island.

The prefix “Kil” is another extremely common start to a place name in Ireland. In Irish, “kil” can mean 'church' if it stems from the root 'cill', or 'wood' if it comes from the root 'coill'. Both of these Irish words are used descriptively in placenames. So, a townland with kil in its name may describe a wooded location or an area with a church. There are countless place names around Ireland that have 'Kil' at the beginning of their names. Counties like Kilkenny and Kildare come to mind. Kildare means 'church of the oak'.

The map has been created by getting the name places that start with "kil" from the webiste Fallingrain. A total of 810 places were found and converted to a shapefile using their coordinates. Once the data was extracted from the website, it was imported to qGIs to create and edit the map having in mind it was going to be displayed on the website. As a final step, the plugin qgis2web was used to export the map in order to view it interactively on the web without any programming skills.

Before you explore the map, please click on the information "i" icon located at the bottom left corner of the map to get more instructions.