placenamesLeitrim
Liatroim
This Galway parish has a nineteenth-century church whose restoration recovered an older decorative scheme.
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
- Liatroim · Irish · main form · non-validated name
- Leitrim · English · main form
Place & story
Education before the present church
In 1837 Lewis distinguished Leitrim village’s 280 inhabitants from the civil parish’s total of 1,679. He described a school maintained by subscriptions, with its schoolhouse built by the Honourable F. Ponsonby, and another private school teaching about a hundred children. His account also placed Leitrim at the head of a Catholic district that included Kilcooley, with a chapel in each. These figures describe institutions and boundaries at that date, before the present Saint Andrew’s was built. [2]
Building and restoring Saint Andrew’s
The diocesan history credits Father Andrew Griffin with building Saint Andrew’s Church, Leitrim, in 1858. An extensive restoration begun late in 2007 repaired the main building and reordered its sanctuary. The decorative work included reinstating late-nineteenth-century wall stencilling. That recovered scheme forms a later layer in the church’s history: it should not automatically be dated to the original construction. The project joined structural repair with renewed attention to an earlier painted interior. [3]
Geographic information
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Leitrim. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Leitrim, County Galway: A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland,1837 · Samuel Lewis
- Leitrim and Ballydugan: Saint Andrew’s church history · Diocese of Clonfert and Diocese of Galway, Kilmacduagh and Kilfenora
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2025-01-10. How this page was prepared.