placenamesLoughan
Lochán
Loughan’s nineteenth-century records distinguish village from parish, while local historical research preserves the story of a banner and fife-and-drum band.
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
- Lochán · Irish · main form · validated name
- Loughan · English · main form
Place & story
Village and parish in 1837
Samuel Lewis described Loghan, or Loughan, on the road running from Dublin through Kells towards Enniskillen. His 1837 entry gave the village 339 inhabitants, distinguishing it from a much larger parish extending into both Meath and Cavan. Other settlements, including Castlekeeran and Derver, lay within that parish. Loughan’s historical name therefore appears at several geographical scales in the surviving records. [2]
A townland census comparison
The official 1851 census lists Loughan townland in the Meath portion of Loughan or Castlekeeran parish. It records 202 inhabitants, compared with 381 in 1841, and 31 inhabited houses against 60 a decade earlier. These figures describe the townland rather than Lewis’s separately described village or the wider parish, and the table does not identify the causes of the population decline. [3]
The banner and the band
Paddy Woods’s local account, published by Meath History Hub, records a Loughan and Mullaghea banner carried to the Kieran Well festival in August 1917. Loughan’s fife-and-drum band accompanied it under John Farnan. The account identifies local tailor James Nevin as the banner’s maker and Loughan Hall as the place where the banner and instruments were stored, connecting music, craft and political gathering. [4]
Geographic information
- Place type
- Population centre
- County
- Meath
- Barony
- Kells Upper
- Civil parish
- Loughan or Castlekeeran
- Coordinates
- 53.77187, -6.92111
- Logainm ID
- 1414672 ↗
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Loughan. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Loghan or Loughan, A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, 1837 · Samuel Lewis; Cavan Townlands historical transcription
- Census of Ireland 1851, County Meath, Loughan townland, PDF page 19 · Census Commissioners, 1852; Central Statistics Office digitisation
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2026-08-12. How this page was prepared.