Map - Mallow, County Cork (Mallow)

Mallow is a town in County Cork, Ireland, approximately thirty-five kilometres north of Cork. Mallow is in the barony of Fermoy.

It is the administrative centre of north County Cork, and the Northern Divisional Offices of Cork County Council are located in the town. Mallow is part of the Cork East Dáil constituency.

The earliest form of the name is Magh nAla, meaning "plain of the stone". In the anglicisation "Mallow", -ow originally represented a reduced schwa sound, which is now however pronounced as a full vowel. In 1975, Mala—a shortening of Magh nAla—was among the first Irish placenames adopted by statute, on the advice of the Placenames branch of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland.

In the Annals of the Four Masters, compiled in the 1630s, Magh nAla is misrepresented as Magh Eala, the Donegal-based authors being insufficiently familiar with Cork places. P.W. Joyce in 1869 surmised that in Magh Eala [sic], Ealla referred to the river Blackwater, and connected the name to the nearby barony of Duhallow. Professor T. F. O'Rahilly in 1938 interpreted Magh Eala as "plain of the swans". This false etymology remains widely cited and has caused resentment by some of the official Mala as being a gratuitous simplification of Magh Eala. However, the name Mala has been used in Irish for more than 300 years.