placenames.ie
Townland

Bright

Breachtán

Census figures and a small archaeological investigation document different aspects of this Lecale townland.

Recorded locationBright54.26984° N · 5.68591° WInteractive map supplied by OpenStreetMap.
Recorded place location · Logainm.ie

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

  • Breachtán · Irish · main form
  • Bright · English · main form

Place & story

The townland in 1901

Bright townland appears in Killough electoral division, Bright parish and Lecale Upper in the original 1901 census. It had seventy-six residents, thirty-seven male and thirty-nine female. Twenty-one of its twenty-two houses were inhabited. The earlier population columns record ninety-nine people in 1881 and ninety-six in 1891. These figures describe the townland, a smaller area than the parish sharing its name. [2]

Testing south of the church

In 2005 Kara Ward of the Centre for Archaeological Fieldwork tested a proposed dwelling site at Bright. Six trenches were opened about 120 metres south of the parish church and 240 metres south of Castle Bright. No archaeological finds or features appeared in those trenches. The result applies to that particular building site, rather than establishing that the surrounding church and castle landscape lacked earlier activity. [3]

Geographic information

Place type
Townland
County
Down
Civil parish
Bright
Coordinates
54.26984, -5.68591
Mapped area
1.4 km²
Logainm ID
66911 ↗

People & family history

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

1926 census

This year is outside the available dataset’s coverage. This does not indicate a population of zero.

Sources & further reading

  1. Logainm.ie — Bright. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
  2. Census of Ireland 1901: County Down, printed p21 · His Majesty’s Stationery Office; printed by Cahill & Company, 1902
  3. 2005:359, Bright, licence AE/05/181 · Kara Ward, Centre for Archaeological Fieldwork, Queen’s University Belfast; 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 2019-06-27. How this page was prepared.