JOHN CREEDON:
Crossing Kilbehenny, I’d always give a big rebel yell!
Alifelong passion for Irish place names informs the debut book from RTÉ’s John Creedon. He talks with Donal O’Keeffe about That Place We Call Home. “When the kids were small, when we were living in Dublin, and driving to Cork, whenever we would cross Kilbehenny, I would always give a big rebel yell, even if I was on my own in the car!” says John Creedon. “A kind of Woohoo!”
Creedon is in fine form and no sooner does he mention Kilbehenny than he adds mischievously “There you go, Donal, that’s perfect for The Avondhu!”
’Tis indeed, I tell him with a laugh. We’re talking today about his debut book, That Place We Call Home and he says he has always had a keen sense of place and of coming home.
“It was almost like, we’re over the Mason-Dixon Line, they’ll never catch us now! That’s exactly what the feeling was, I’m among my own people, if a row breaks out, they’ll stand up for me.
“I think place is very important for our mental health. I know it’s been very good for me, because I always know I can breathe out when I get home.”
Creedon’s debut book is subtitled “A journey through the place names of Ireland”. Regular listeners to Creedon’s radio show (8pm, weeknights, RTÉ Radio 1) know that, in between playing great music, he regularly wanders down bóithrín na smaointe, “the little byroads of thought”, where musings on the origins of place names are a recurring theme.
His 2019 television series Creedon’s Atlas of Ireland, which returns for a second series in early 2021, allowed him to explore his interest in place names and that in turn led to That Place We Call Home.
Describing the book as “a real labour of love”, Creedon says he wrote it “pretty much during the pandemic ... I started in January and I really got a push-on during the lockdown. They were crazy days really, ten hours a day for ten weeks.
“I had to do a huge amount of fact-checking. I’m not a professor of anything. I’m not an academic at all, at all. I just overhear things. I love accents and I’m observant, I hope and I’ve always had a grá for place names.”
Creedon talks in his book about the Dindsenchas, the lore of places:
“Long ago, the lore would have been passed on by word of mouth. Some of the place names we still have come from languages which are now obsolete, so we will never know for sure what the names of some places mean and if the natural features have changed, then the clues are gone as well.
“Place names, in many ways, offer us clues about who the people who came before us and, if you look at those names, you’d have to say they sound like a nice people, a gentle people.
“What struck me like a thunderbolt is how close my own generation is to being the last where you just listen to old folks go on and on and on, absorbing information like that,” he says.
“I often remember just drifting off in my aunt Kit’s house and, it was like a mumbled Rosary, just absorbing the stuff they were talking about and a lot of it was about placing people, like the roots of a tree, spreading our understanding of the world and what lies beyond the parish.
“That was seanachos, that was learning stuff that was not necessarily in books. All this stuff was just passed on by word of mouth and my generation is toward the tail end of that.
“The seanachos and the dindsenchas, make places animated, becoming living, breathing things.”
That Place We Call Home is a great read – Creedon’s voice is as distinctive, easy and relatable in print as it is on the wireless – and, despite his protestations, it’s a scholarly book, packing tons of learning into readable and always entertaining bites. (In local news, he heads to Newtwopothouse in search of Oldtwopothouse, but I won’t spoil whether he finds it.)
A glossary at the back of the book translates the words we regularly use in Irish place names and, in a lovely touch, he offers the reader space to record their own journeys through Ireland’s place names.
For many of us, John Creedon is the voice of a friend in the kitchen, on a weeknight after the dinner, recommending new songs, reminding us of familiar or forgotten music, or just caffling with listener’s texts and tweets.
Creedon says that, growing up, their family shop was only closed one day a year, Christmas Day.
“I still love the crib and that story of a young, displaced family in the Middle East.”
Every year, on his Christmas morning show on RTÉ Radio 1, Creedon gives voice to the Irish diaspora, reminding those of us at home that those of us far from home still hold us in their hearts as tightly as we hold them.
In this year of Covid, perhaps more than at any other recent time, many of us will cling firm to that lifeline.
CREEDON CRAICS THE CODE
In this excerpt from That Place We Call Home, John Creedon looks at the origins of Castletownroche’s name.
I remember once driving through Castletownroche and thinking “This place name has it all going on!” Castle/town/ Roche, three parts, and all of them Norman. Let’s break it down.
Castletownroche - Baile Chaiseáin an Róistigh Baile – Home/townland/town
Caisleán (Caisleáin) – Castle An Róisteach (an Róistigh) – (of Mr) Roche
Castletownroche therefore means “townland/town at Roche Castle”.
Its original name was Dún Cruadha, founded about 2,000 years ago on the site of a previous fortress from the Iron Age. In the late 13th century, during the Norman era in Ireland, the Ango-Norman family de la Roche built a fortress here, hence the name Castletownroche.
That Place We Call Home by John Creedon is published by Gill Books. Available now in bookshops and online priced at €19.99