The counties of Ireland are historic administrative divisions of the island. They began as Norman structures, and as the powers exercised by the Cambro-Norman barons and the Old English nobility waned over time, new offices of political control came to be established at a county level. The number of counties varied depending on the time period, however thirty-two is the traditionally accepted and used number.
A site of special scientific interest (SSSI) in Great Britain, or an area of special scientific interest (ASSI) in the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland, is a conservation designation denoting a protected area in the United Kingdom and Isle of Man. SSSI/ASSIs are the basic building block of site-based nature conservation legislation and most other legal nature/geological conservation designations in the United Kingdom are based upon them, including national nature reserves, Ramsar sites, Special Protection Areas, and Special Areas of Conservation. The acronym "SSSI" is often pronounced "triple-S I".
The administrative geography of the United Kingdom is complex, multi-layered and non-uniform. The United Kingdom, a sovereign state to the northwest of continental Europe, consists of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. For local government in the United Kingdom, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales each have their own system of administrative and geographic demarcation. Consequently, there is "no common stratum of administrative unit encompassing the United Kingdom".
A townland is a small geographical division of land, historically and currently used in Ireland and in the Western Isles in Scotland, typically covering 100–500 acres (40–202 ha). The townland system is of Gaelic origin, antedating the Norman invasion, and most have names of Irish origin. However, some townland names and boundaries come from Norman manors, plantation divisions, or later creations of the Ordnance Survey. The total number of inhabited townlands in Ireland was 60,679 in 1911. The total number recognised by the Irish Place Names database as of 2014 was 61,098, including uninhabited townlands, mainly small islands.
The counties of the United Kingdom are subnational divisions of the United Kingdom, used for the purposes of administrative, geographical and political demarcation. The older term, shire is historically equivalent to county. By the Middle Ages, county had become established as the unit of local government, at least in England. By the early 17th century, all of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland had been separated into counties. In Scotland shire was the only term used until after the Act of Union 1707.
In Ireland, a barony is a historical subdivision of a county, analogous to the hundreds into which the counties of England were divided. Baronies were created during the Tudor reconquest of Ireland, replacing the earlier cantreds formed after the original Norman invasion. Some early baronies were later subdivided into half baronies with the same standing as full baronies.
The Vice-county Census Catalogue of the Vascular Plants of Great Britain (ISBN 0-901158-30-5) is an A5 softback book produced in 2003 by the Botanical Society of the British Isles. It attempts to present a complete picture of the vice-county distribution of vascular plant species in Great Britain, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands. Its compilers were C. A. Stace, R. G. Ellis, D. H. Kent and D. J. McCosh.
"Carrickfergus" is an Irish folk song, named after the town of Carrickfergus in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. The Clancy Brothers' 1964 album titled "The First Hurrah!" includes this title. A somewhat differing version was released under the name "The Kerry Boatman", by Dominic Behan on an LP called The Irish Rover, in 1965.
A county is a geographic region within Gaelic games, controlled by a county board of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and originally based on the 32 counties of Ireland as they were in 1884. While the administrative geography of Ireland has since changed, with several new counties created and the six that make up Northern Ireland superseded by 11 local government districts, the counties in Gaelic games have remained largely unchanged.
Irish, also known as Irish Gaelic or simply Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language group, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was the population's first language until the 19th century, when English gradually became dominant, particularly in the last decades of the century. Today, Irish is still commonly spoken as a first language in areas of Ireland collectively known as the Gaeltacht, in which only 2% of Ireland's population lived in 2022.
This page details statistics of the All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship.
Island Eddy is a small, depopulated island at the inner, eastern end of Galway Bay, Ireland.
In Ireland, the term city has somewhat differing meanings in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Civil parishes are units of territory in the island of Ireland that have their origins in old Gaelic territorial divisions. They were adopted by the Anglo-Norman Lordship of Ireland and then by the Elizabethan Kingdom of Ireland, and were formalised as land divisions at the time of the Plantations of Ireland. They no longer correspond to the boundaries of Roman Catholic or Church of Ireland parishes, which are generally larger. Their use as administrative units was gradually replaced by Poor Law Divisions in the 19th century, although they were not formally abolished. Today they are still sometimes used for legal purposes, such as to locate property in deeds of property registered between 1833 and 1946.
Michael Charles Faraday Proctor PhD was an English botanist and plant ecologist, lecturer, scientific author based at the University of Exeter. He retired from his post as Reader in Plant Ecology at Exeter University in 1994.
The following article provides a list of Gaelic games governing bodies, county boards and associations around the world. The principal governing body is the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA).
Jean Annette Paton is a British botanist, bryologist and botanical illustrator. She has written many books on the bryology of the United Kingdom and the flora of Cornwall, and described several new species.
