The Black Islands are a group of small low-lying islands located roughly midway along the north–south axis of Lough Ree in central Ireland. The islands belong to the parish of Cashel, barony of Rathcline, Co. Longford. At first glance the names of the islands are strikingly different to the general run of townland and larger feature names in and around the lake, being entirely made up of apparently transparent English elements: King’s Island, Nut Island, Sand Island, Girls’ Island, Horse Island, Red Island, Long Island. For comparison, we need only look to some of Lough Ree’s larger islands – Inchcleraun, Inchmore, Inchturk, Inchbofin, Inchenagh, Incharmadermot, Clawinch etc. – where Irish names predominate. The name of the archipelago itself, Black Islands, sometimes shortened locally to ‘the Blacks’, follows the same pattern. The Ordnance Survey recorded no Irish-language forms of the names in the 1830s, though the language was certainly spoken in the area at the time. All, however, may not be as it seems. There is solid evidence that the names of three of the larger islands are translations, or pseudo-translations of topographical Irish names. Displacement of Irish place-names by informal English ‘translations’ was a fairly common practice in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, especially in the west of Ireland (e.g. ‘Backfox’ or Droim Sionnach, Co Mayo). In the case of King’s Island, the largest of the Black Islands, this change seems to have occurred in the period 1731–1808.