placenamesBallyduff
An Baile Dubh
This Dingle-peninsula parish appears in nineteenth-century accounts of mountain farming, an auxiliary workhouse and a local story about the last wolf.
The name
These Irish name elements are associated with this record in the Logainm glossary.
An element’s translation is a clue, rather than a complete explanation of the name. Its form and meaning depend on local history and the full Irish name.
Recorded forms
- An Baile Dubh · Irish · main form · validated name
- Ballyduff · English · main form
Place & story
Mountain and cultivated ground
Ballyduff in Corkaguiny lay near the Dingle–Tralee road. Lewis’s 1837 description gave the parish a population of 420, with 92 people in its small village. Almost half its area consisted of mountain and bog, though he considered the cultivated land good. Fifteen village houses and a police station stood within this much larger rural landscape. Catholic administration linked the parish with the Castlegregory district. [2]
Liscarney and the Poor Law Guardians
The University of Galway’s Landed Estates record identifies a Liscarney property that Edward Hussey leased to the Dingle Poor Law Guardians as an auxiliary workhouse. It also distinguishes Liscarney House, associated by Lewis with T. B. Hussey, from that institution. At Griffith’s Valuation the house was leased to Brigid Flaherty and valued at just £1. The database notes that it does not appear on the 1890s twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey map. [3]
A wolf story recorded in 1837
Lewis placed a glen called Maharabo on the parish boundary and recorded a local claim that the last wolf in that part of the country had been killed there. The remembered spot was called Wolf Step. His account supplies evidence that the story and place association circulated by 1837; it supplies no date for the killing and does not establish when wolves finally disappeared from Kerry. [2]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Civil parish
- County
- Kerry
- Barony
- Corkaguiny
- Coordinates
- 52.20491, -10.14594
- Mapped area
- 28.55 km²
- Logainm ID
- 1054 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Ballyduff. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Ballyduff, Corkaguiney: A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837) · Samuel Lewis
- Liscarney: Landed Estates property 2176 · University of Galway, Landed Estates Database
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2025-01-10. How this page was prepared.