placenamesBarna
An Bhearna
Barna’s older crossroads settlement, nearby archaeological cropmarks and school projects offer different ways into the history of this East Limerick community.
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
- An Bhearna · Irish · main form · validated name
- Barna · English · main form
Place & story
Twenty houses at a meeting of roads
The Ordnance Survey name books describe Barna as a small village on rising ground where the Pallasgreen–Oola road crossed the route from New Pallas to Emly. Four townlands met here: Treanmanagh, Plaukarauka, Ballynaclogh and Gortnacoolagh. The survey recorded about twenty houses, built of mud, including two licensed public houses. This compact description preserves the scale and building materials of the nineteenth-century settlement around its crossroads. [2]
An enclosure revealed from the air
In Ballynaclogh, a short distance north of the village, an enclosure was identified during the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986. It lies in low pasture near drains and watercourses, west of the boundary with Plaukarauka. The National Monuments Service records a semicircular cropmark on the original photograph and a D-shaped outline on later aerial images. It was absent from the historic Ordnance Survey maps. Two recorded ring-barrows lie farther northwest. [3]
Local history in the classroom
Barna National School has made the surrounding district’s history part of pupils’ work. Its April 2015 newsletter records projects about Titanic passenger Tom O’Brien of Bonovie and Olympic hammer thrower Paddy Ryan. The school also created a website about Sarsfield’s Rock, describing the historic site as three miles away. The projects brought stories of migration, sport and military history into the village’s classroom. [4] [5]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Population centre
- County
- Limerick
- Barony
- Coonagh
- Civil parish
- Grean
- Civil parish
- Ballynaclogh
- Within
- Ballynaclogh
- Within
- Plaukarauka
- Coordinates
- 52.53710, -8.32989
- Logainm ID
- 1165513 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Barna. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Ordnance Survey name books, Grean parish, Barna village, page 792 · Ordnance Survey, John O’Donovan; Limerick Local Studies
- Sites and Monuments Record LI024-191: enclosure, Ballynaclogh · Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly, National Monuments Service; record reproduced by TreeAlive
- Barna NS Newsletter, April 2015 · Barna National School
- The story of Sarsfield’s Rock: our school · Barna National School
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2026-10-07. How this page was prepared.