placenamesKilcoo
Cill Chua
Nineteenth-century school patronage and reservoir construction connected this Mourne parish with wider social and industrial networks.
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
- Cill Chua · Irish · main form
- Kilcoo · English · main form
Place & story
The Roden schools
The Earl of Roden founded a school at Fofeny in 1822 and built another for boys, with accommodation for its master, in 1826. The Countess supported a girls’ school and mistress’s cottage at Bryansford, also built in 1822. Lewis’s 1837 account lists further schools at Lower Kilcoo, Ballymoney and Ardaghy. He counted about 650 children across these establishments, with another forty at a private school, showing educational provision spread beyond the principal villages. [2]
Lough Island Reavy’s engineered lake
Lough Island Reavy became a reservoir completed in 1839, with William Fairbairn named as consulting engineer in the architectural archive. A British Dam Society account describes four earth embankments with central clay cores, impounding the Muddock, a tributary of the Bann. These structures total roughly a kilometre in length. Later alterations formed part of the reservoir’s history too: the engineers’ 2014 guide records an additional sluice installed in 2011 to allow faster emergency drawdown. [3] [4]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Civil parish
- County
- Down
- Barony
- Iveagh Upper, Lower Half
- Coordinates
- 54.20704, -5.93069 (approximate)
- Mapped area
- 73.72 km²
- Logainm ID
- 65737 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Kilcoo. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Kilcoo: A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland1837 · Samuel Lewis
- Lough Island Reavy Reservoir, British Dam Society2014conference tour guide, page10 · British Dam Society; Alan Cooper, URS; NI Water
- John Frederick La Trobe Bateman: Lough Island Reavy Reservoir, completed1839 · Irish Architectural Archive, Dictionary of Irish Architects
- Lough Island Reavy and its eastern dam, County Down, as photographed in July 2016 illustration: based on a The eastern dam of Lough Island Reavy by Eric Jones. AI-assisted watercolour and ink adaptation; cream paper margins added, incidental clutter omitted and fine details simplified. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2019-10-08. How this page was prepared.