placenames.ie
Townland

Adamstown

Baile Adaim

An early will and modern archaeological testing illuminate this small Dublin townland beside the railway.

Recorded locationAdamstown53.33508° N · 6.45125° WInteractive map supplied by OpenStreetMap.
Recorded place location · Logainm.ie

The name

bailetownland, town, homestead

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

  • Baile Adaim · Irish · main form · validated name
  • Adamstown · English · main form

Place & story

People & connections

Thomas Adam’s household

In his 1906 history, Francis Elrington Ball associated Adamstown Castle with the Adam family, established in nearby Esker during the sixteenth century. He considered Thomas Adam, who died in 1556, its probable owner. Ball’s account of Thomas’s will lists livestock and household possessions and names his wife, Bell Gaydon, two daughters and his brother Nicholas. Thomas requested burial in Esker churchyard. The suggested castle ownership remains Ball’s qualified interpretation. [2]

Testing beside the lost castle

Before a housing development, archaeologist Georgina Scally tested a field in Adamstown near the Newcastle Road because it lay close to the castle site. Her 2002 report records seven trenches, each between thirty and fifty metres long, with no archaeological finds, features or structures uncovered. This negative result concerns the tested field; it does not establish that the castle itself had left no buried remains. [3]

Geographic information

Place type
Townland
County
Dublin
Barony
Newcastle
Civil parish
Aderrig
Coordinates
53.33508, -6.45125
Mapped area
0.45 km²
Logainm ID
17109 ↗

People & family history

Census figures refer to the matched historical census area for each year. Boundaries and spellings can change over time.

Sources & further reading

  1. Logainm.ie — Adamstown. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  2. A History of the County Dublin,Volume4,1906,pp59–60 · Francis Elrington Ball
  3. Adamstown,2002:0448,licence01E1147 · Georgina Scally, Margaret Gowen & Co. Ltd.; Excavations.ie
  4. Boundary geometry retains its source attribution and licence in the downloadable geographic record. Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2024-08-20. How this page was prepared.