Ó Creachmhaoil

Ó Creachmhaoil is an Irish surname, often anglicised as Craughwell, Croughwell, Crockwell, and Crowell. It was largely unknown outside of the south-east of County Galway, where the village of Creachmhaoil is also found, until the latter end of the 19th century when emigres established branches of the family which still thrive in Newfoundland, Bermuda,Cornwall, Ohio and Berkshire County, Massachusetts, among other places. The surname was found in Barbados in the 19th Century, having evidently arrived in the 17th Century (probably as part of the involuntary Irish immigration to Barbados that followed the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland), but is now extinct there, possibly as a result of re-emigration (the Crockwells of Bermuda descend from a single white Barbadian who settled there in the 19th Century). Documentation on the origin of the surname is not recorded, but it is doubtless connected to the village.

Ó, in Irish surnames, indicates a grandson or descendant of the person whose given name it precedes (as in Ó Briain: grandson of Brian). Creachmhaoil is not used as a given name in Ireland, and is actually a toponym, composed of two Gaelic words.

Creach, which is related to craig, and creag, and the English word crag, refers to a rock (with which word it rhymes), or the bare rock crest of a hill (related words are cruach, for a mountain, pinnacle, or a rounded hill that stands apart...or for any type of pile, or heap, and 'cnoc', for a hill or eminence). An alternate etymology of creach is plunder, presumably in reference to herds of cattle, which were often targets of thefts and cattle raids amongst the Gaels. The usual Gaelic word for cattle is crodh, often Anglicised in place-names as crow, although the words cro, crocharsach, and crò are all connected with sheep, sheep enclosures or meadows.

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