It occured to me today that when “we” are out inquiring about field names from farmers, we usually only get the names on the farm we are on or maybe neighbouring farms. I think what is very important to consider is asking the wife in the house (if she’s not already the informant) about her homestead. It’s likely that she grew up on a farm as well. And she could be from some remote area that the surveyor (“we”) is not likely to get to any time soon.

Of course you have to be prepared for that eventuality. Going out to the farm with FieldPapers of that farm won’t be any use for the wife from further afield (pun not intended). Taking a laptop, praying for good broadband and using OSM there and then might be the better strategy. If she doesn’t remember, she might still have a brother or nephew on the home farm. Once the contact is established, a FieldPaper atlas could be sent to him. She will be able to explain it to him in their own words rather than in our mappers’ lingo.

This is all academic so far; I haven’t had a chance to try it. Yet.

So, after I got a couple more field names from yesterday’s farmer, I went and ran an overpass-turbo query for fieldnames by looking for landuse=farmland, landuse=meadow and landuse=orchard plus name=*. It came up with about 700 results and i zoomed into most of them.

Here is what I found how to do better in my opinion:

1. Don’t tag a whole farm as “landuse=farmland”. If Old MacDonald had a farm, line out every field in it and tag them individually as “landuse=farmland” or “landuse=meadow” or whatever they are.
2. Don’t ever use “name=field” for a field. Obviously, it is a field. You can call a spade a spade, but don’t name tag a field as a field. Especially, don’t tag eight fields in a row as “name=field”. Names are used to differentiate between two or more similar items. if you had five dogs in your family, you wouldn’t refer to them all as “dog”.

Anyway, I had to bring the number down to 670 by correcting all this. That is very few field names indeed. And it should actually be lower than that, because some village greens are tagged as “landuse=meadow”, when there should be something like “leisure=green”. In my understanding of the English language, a meadow is the land adjacent to a stream or river, but then again, I’m not a native speaker.

Sorry for getting so angry.

I have befriended this farmer who has given me a lot of field names today. His family has been on the land for five generations, so some of the names are in Irish, but we both had no idea how to spell them. So I spelled them how I would spell them and then looked the townsland up in Owen O’Kelly’s Book “Place-names of County Kilkenny” and tried to match them up, but my Irish is really bad and not sufficient for such a job.

I also found a benchmark on his land which I had overlooked earlier.

I have another list of 80 odd field names I got today from a different townsland (Ruthstown) and it looks like I got all the fields in that townsland. I have my work cut out for me. I hope DeBigC and Sascha are gonna be pleased. I am.

So, I had made this umap of field names done in Ireland using overpass-turbo (learning so much, it’s amazing!), and I noticed someone had done tremendous work in Bannow Bay, which is where the Normans first landed and there are some very interesting field names there. There is a Chapel Field and one was Roche’s Field, a common Norman name in Wexford. It just goes to show how much history is captured in those field names. And also The Blue Bell, how cute is that?

And I have actually been there and like many other mappers, I do go into OSM when I visit a place and might add a few things. So I knew for certain that these were recent additions. I much appreciate Sascha’s contribution. I wish him success in continuing his work there. Maybe I’ll get a chance to add some in Cullenstown, not too far from there.

Exciting, first entry: So, I’ve been interested in fieldnames in Ireland for a while. Maybe because it’s so exotic to me, because I’m not from a farming background and I’m not aware they exist in Germany. Maybe because it’s oral history and highly underrated by scholars and taken for granted by farmers, i.e. they don’t see the value in their personal heritage (“Sure, that’s just the name we use, like.”).

I’m also a member of Kilkenny Archaeological Society and always on the lookout for group projects that might bring new members into the society or just a bit more engagement with actual people rather than books or bones.

Anyway, being a newbie on FieldPapers, I thought I’d give it at try. I had got a glimps into FieldPapers during the talk Ciarán gave. I liked the idea that a group of people could work together, maybe even in a school project. Gotta get them mappers young!

The Links

The first video is about how to make the atlas, the second about how to use the png files in the iD editor. I thought JOSM was a bit too techical and scary for beginners. It’s also not terribly more useful for field names than the iD Editor is. I had made a tutorial before that of just using the iD editor.

I had sent links to a couple of historical and archaeological societies I found on Facebook, the ones that did reply (lockdown + expected demographic = non responsive) were throughout postitive about it and shared it on their page. I just picked some random ones where county names came to mind. I should send out a few more to the Wesht, before it’s too late.