placenamesBlaris
Bláras
Lewis’s Lisburn entry also describes the wider parish called Blaris, which crossed the county boundary.
The name
A reliable full-name meaning has not been established here. The recorded Irish and English forms are given without an unsupported translation.
Recorded forms
- Bláras · Irish · main form
- Blaris · English · main form
Place & story
Wheat replaces the older staple
Samuel Lewis explicitly identified Lisburn parish with Blaris in 1837, describing territory in both Antrim and Down. He reported that wheat had become the staple crop over the preceding twenty years. Oats, formerly the main produce, were then grown as part of crop rotation. The statement concerns the wider historic parish, rather than the built-up town or only its Down portion, and does not establish the acreage devoted to either crop. [2]
Worship in schoolhouses
Although Lewis reported no chapels of ease within the parish, services were held in rotation in the schoolhouses at Newport, Maze and Broomhedge. These buildings therefore supported worship as well as education in his account. He does not provide a rotation timetable, and the entry does not establish that the arrangements continued unchanged after 1837. [2]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Civil parish
- County
- Down
- Barony
- Castlereagh Upper
- Barony
- Iveagh Lower, Upper Half
- Coordinates
- 54.50065, -6.11659 (approximate)
- Logainm ID
- 65704 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Blaris. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Lisburn (also Blaris parish), A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837) · Samuel Lewis
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2019-10-08. How this page was prepared.