School: Finiskill (roll number 13075)
- Location:
- Finiskil, Co. Leitrim
- Teacher: Cathal Ó Floinn
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0219, Page 347
Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.
See copyright details.
DownloadOpen data
Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- XML School: Finiskill
- XML Page 347
- XML “My Home District - Finiskill”
Note: We will soon deprecate our XML Application Programming Interface and a new, comprehensive JSON API will be made available. Keep an eye on our website for further details.
On this page
- About 45 people inhabit this townland and there are 7 families living in it. Reynolds is the family name most common . The houses are all thatched and the greater number of them have high pointed gables. A few of them have got a low, rounded style of gable. This kind of gable is common all over the neighbourhood especially in the older houses but the high pointed gable is now more popular. The reason for its popularity probably is that the roof is more easily thatched. The older people believe that the low rounded gable was popular in olden times because of the fact that most of the houses were then mud walled structures. Now, it would be difficult to build a high-pointed gable using only mud, so the lower gable, being safer and more cosy-looking, were for the latter reason more popular.
The derivation of this townland is "The fair armpit". Fionn Ascall. The word Fionn scarcely conveys its usual meaning i.e. of colour, in the case of this place name. On the contrary I think it would more probably be better translated as "beautiful" as it would be meaningless if translated as "fair" in describing a place name. Ascall seems at first to convey very little meaning but if we observe the shape of the Townland as it appears on the 1 inch Ordnance Survey Map of the district its meaning is made quite clear to us. The townland is, in fact shaped roughly like a carpenter's or mason's square, which is, admittedly, somewhat like the human armpit when the arm is extended directly from the(continues on next page)
