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
Cúil Raithin· Irish · main form · validated name
Coleraine· English · main form
Place & story
The older western bank
Lewis’s account identifies Killowen, on the west bank of the Bann, with the older town and its religious foundation. His entry treats Coleraine as port, borough, market town and parish, while separately counting inhabitants in Killowen. This is a useful warning against assuming that one town name has always represented one compact area. River crossings and changing jurisdictions can leave a single community divided between several historical descriptions.[2]
The plantation town
The directory connects the 1613 charter and the London companies with obligations to build, populate and enclose the new town and establish a market. It quotes early surveys describing incomplete building and weak earthwork defences. The intended town and the town actually constructed were therefore different subjects. These accounts help explain the role of leases and building incentives in settlement, without implying that every later resident belonged to one original group of settlers.[2]
Bridges, names and source limits
Lewis records a timber bridge erected in 1716, its collapse after flood damage in 1739, and a replacement built in 1743 and later widened. A bridge reference needs a date before it can be tied to a particular structure. His name explanation is an antiquarian interpretation and is not adopted here as a settled translation. For a household, retain the bank, parish and street where available; “Coleraine” alone can conceal precisely the distinctions that shaped the town.[2]
People & connections
Sam Henry’s work among local people
Sam Henry was born in Coleraine and worked as a pensions and excise officer. His contact with older people helped him collect songs and folklore, while photography created another record of communities across Ulster. Coleraine Museum preserves diaries, correspondence, books, photographs and personal objects from this work. The collection’s importance lies partly in these relationships with informants: traditional material reached print through identifiable acts of collecting, not by appearing as an anonymous store of timeless local facts. Henry also shared songs through radio, with his first broadcast recorded in May 1925.[5]
Folklore & tradition
Songs of the People
Henry’s Songs of the People appeared in the Northern Constitution during the interwar years. A museum cataloguing project describes the weekly series as running from 1923 to 1939, while another introductory page ends it in 1938. The secure point is the sustained work of collecting and publishing during that period, not a forced choice between the two summaries. The songs preserve remembered music and dialect from a wider Ulster area; they should not all be assigned to Coleraine merely because the collector and archive are associated with the town. This profile identifies the tradition without reproducing song lyrics.[4][5]
Both censuses use the same 2015 settlement boundary. These exact counts cover usual residents in the settlement, rather than local government districts or historic counties. Other NISRA tables may use approximate counts.
View population figures
COLERAINE — Settlement 2015 (N11000173) — census population
placenames