Darú

The Irish name Darú is glossed as 'plain of the oaks', and the place is also recorded under the older names Darmhagh and Dearmach, both pointing to an oak plain. The village lies in Ballycowan barony, and its civil parish straddles the Westmeath border. Tradition holds that St Colum Cille founded a monastery here, which a nineteenth-century gazetteer dates to 546. Bede later described it as a ...