Bohermeen

Bohermeen is a Roman Catholic parish in the Irish Diocese of Meath. Its English name is a corruption of an ancient Irish language name, An Bóthar Mín, which meant the smooth road. Originally one of the five famed ancient roadways that led from the mediaeval capital of Ireland, Tara, approximately 10 miles away cut through the area. The quality of the roadway, in an era of dirt-roads (which still exist today), earned for it the nickname of the smooth road, An Bóthar Mín.

For nearly fourteen hundred years the local area went by the name of Ard Braccan or Ardbraccan, meaning the height of Braccan, the hill on which St. Braccan located his mediaeval monastery and which in the 9th century became a diocese with its own bishop. Even when the diocese of Ardbraccan joined with other small dioceses such as Fore and Kells to form the Diocese of Meath, Braccan's hill became the location of the palace of the Bishop of Meath.

Following the establishment of the (Anglican) Church of Ireland Ardbraccan became the seat of the Protestant Lord Bishop of Meath. Anglican bishops continued to live in the area until 1958. When in the nineteenth century the Roman Catholic Church re-established a local parish in the area, it was decided to use a different name to the local Church of Ireland parish of Ardbraccan. 'Bohermeen' became the chosen name. A curate in the parish of Navan, the large town nearby, Dean Cogan, who himself had once served as a curate in Bohermeen, and who wrote the acclaimed History of the Diocese of Meath (2 volumes) in the 1860s bemoaned the choice of the secular Bohermeen (or Bohermien as he wrote it) as the parish name ahead of the more religious Ardbraccan name.

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