Ballyconnell
human settlement
Ballyconnell (Irish: Béal Átha Conaill, meaning 'entrance to the ford of Conall') is a market town in County Cavan, Ireland. It is on the N87 road at the junction of four townlands: Annagh, Cullyleenan, Doon (Tomregan) and Derryginny, and is in the civil parish of Tomregan, in the historical barony of Tullyhaw.
Ballyconnell won the Irish Tidy Towns Competition in 1971 and 1975. According to the 2022 census, the population of the town was 1,422.
Name
The earliest surviving mention of the name Ballyconnell is an entry in the Annals of the Four Masters for the year 1323 A.D., which states "Rory Mac Mahon, son of the Lord of Oriel, Melaghlin O'Seagannain, and Mac Muldoon, were slain by Cathal O'Rourke at Bel-atha-Chonaill". Before being named Ballyconnell, it was named Maigen which means 'the little plain' with the local ford called Áth na Mianna which means 'ford of the miners'. It was also named Gwyllymsbrook between 1660 and 1702 by its then owner, Thomas Gwyllym.
Ballyconnell is an anglicisation of Béal Átha Conaill which means 'entrance to Conall's ford'. The ford was a shallow crossing over the River Gráinne ( Grainne was the wife of the Fianna warrior-god Fionn MacCumhaill) now called the Woodford River part of the Shannon–Erne Waterway canal, which once was the ancient border crossing for travellers going between Ulster and Connacht. The ford was caused by silt and gravel washed down from the nearby Slieve Rushen mountain by the Tanyard Stream, which flows into the Woodford River about 20 yards upstream from Ballyconnell Bridge on the western outskirts of the town.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ballyconnell” as human settlement. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as human settlement. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q252031. Authority coordinates are 54.117, -7.583. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971, 1975, 2022 and 1323.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ballyconnell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.