placenamesMaghera
Machaire Rátha
Lewis’s industrial account links an active bleach-green with the remains of a much older works.
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
- Machaire Rátha · Irish · main form
- Maghera · English · main form
Place & story
Linen for overseas markets
At Upperlands, within his account of Maghera parish, Samuel Lewis recorded a bleach-green finishing about eight thousand pieces of linen each year for English and American markets. His 1837 description also noted numerous corn and flax mills on the parish’s streams. These details place rural manufacture alongside farming in the parish’s working landscape. [2]
An earlier ironworking site
Lewis also described remains at Drumconready: building foundations and heaps of partly smelted ore and charcoal. He dated the ironworks to the reign of Charles I and reported its destruction in 1641. These are the remains recorded in his nineteenth-century account; their present condition is not established here. [2]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Civil parish
- County
- Derry
- Barony
- Loughinsholin
- Coordinates
- 54.84723, -6.65239 (approximate)
- Mapped area
- 92.2 km²
- Logainm ID
- 2911 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Maghera. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Maghera, Londonderry: A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837) · Samuel Lewis
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2011-08-23. How this page was prepared.