The Mountains of Cooley • Placenames and the People

The cadgers were the women who walked over the mountains from Omeath to Ravensdale and Dundalk with their baskets of herring on their backs. The route over the mountains was the shortest way and soon came to be known as Cadgers' Pad.
This video which has been funded by the Heritage Council, examines our rich legacy of
Gaelic place-names in the Cooley Mountains. Through the summer we captured drone footage of
walkers on the Cadgers’ Pad; we tracked the hunt for the Brown Bull through Doolargy and
Ballymakellett; we took a look at the many O’Neill families of Glenmore; and we heard about the
forty families cleared out of Moneycrockroe to make way for the landlord’s bullocks.
The video was captured, shot and edited by Lightstorm Media,
/ @danmc0605
The video was produced by the Team at Carlingford Lough Heritage Trust.
The human record is visible throughout the mountains; great burial cairns on the summits; ancient crop ridges and ringforts on the lower slopes; ruins of booley huts in the river glens.
Through the turf fields and the forests we can follow the many miles of stone walls built as relief works in the Great Famine, and occasionally we can find the
lazy beds where people tried to grow healthy potatoes.
There is another record of human activity. This is also a cultural landscape. The people who walked and worked these hills took ownership of them by describing and naming the places they used. Many of those names are still here, still in use, still descriptive and still culturally important.
[Interview with Eve Campbell, archaeologist]
“Placenames are key to understanding how people made meaning for themselves in this landscape. They were like a mental map for those who used these mountains through more than 5000 years, for hunting and grazing and cutting turf, as a place of refuge and a route to inland areas. The names had practical meaning. The same hill or rock may have different names depending on where you view it from, which can be useful"