Reading Place Names

Place names are the most durable thing on any map. Buildings fall down, boundaries move, languages retreat, and the names stay, often for a thousand years and often long after nobody locally understands them.

In Powys that produces something striking. Eastern Radnorshire has been English-speaking for two centuries and its map is almost entirely Welsh.

The common elements

A working vocabulary of about twenty words will decode most of the county.

Settlement and structure. Llan is an enclosure, and by extension a church site, almost always followed by a saint's name: Llanidloes, the enclosure of Idloes. Tre or tref is a farmstead or township. Caer is a fort, usually Roman or Iron Age. Pandy is a fulling mill; melin an ordinary one. Eglwys is a church, capel a chapel.

Water. Aber is a river mouth or confluence, so Aberhonddu is the mouth of the Honddu and Abermule the mouth of the Mule. Rhyd is a ford, pont a bridge, ffynnon a spring or well, pwll a pool, rhaeadr a waterfall.

Ground. Cwm is a valley, usually a short steep one. Bryn a hill, mynydd a mountain, garth a ridge or enclosure, allt a wooded slope, pant a hollow, maes an open field, dôl a meadow in a river bend, ystrad a valley floor, rhos moorland, waun or gwaun wet moor.

Colour and shape. Du black, gwyn white, coch red, glas blue or green, melyn yellow, hir long, bach small, mawr great, newydd new, hen old.

Ystradgynlais is the valley floor of the Gynlais. Rhaeadr Gwy is the waterfall on the Wye. Tref-y-clawdd is the town on the dyke. Once you can see the joints, most names stop being opaque.

Mutation, which trips everyone up

Welsh initial consonants change according to what precedes them, and place names are full of the results. Pont becomes bont after y: Y Bontnewydd. Caer becomes gaer: Y Gaer. Mawr becomes fawr: Fforest Fawr. Bach becomes fach.

That means the dictionary form is often not the form on the map, which is the single most common reason people give up.

What English adds

The border brings English and Norse elements in from the east, sometimes alongside a Welsh name for the same place and sometimes replacing it.

Knighton and Tref-y-clawdd are unrelated names for one town. Hay and Y Gelli Gandryll both describe woodland but neither is a translation of the other. Montgomery is Norman French from a family estate in Normandy; Trefaldwyn is Welsh from a different man entirely.

Where you find -ton, -ley, -cot or -worth in Powys you are almost always in the eastern border strip: Norton, Whitton, Discoed, Churchstoke.

The traps

Folk etymology is the biggest hazard, and Victorian guidebooks are full of it.

The second trap is anglicised spellings recorded by English clerks and surveyors who did not speak Welsh. Llan becomes Lan or Clan; ll becomes l or thl; whole syllables vanish. The Ordnance Survey improved matters from the nineteenth century but many field and farm names on older documents are phonetic guesses.

Field names

The real depth is below settlement level. Tithe apportionment schedules of the 1840s record the name of every field in almost every parish in Wales, and they are free to consult through the National Library.

Those names record what a place was actually used for: cae'r ysgubor, the barn field; gwaun y gwartheg, the cattle moor; ffridd, the rough grazing between the enclosed land and the open mountain; hafod, the summer dwelling. A parish's field names will often preserve Welsh two centuries after the parish stopped speaking it.

Where to look

The National Library's Places of Wales site for tithe maps and apportionments. The Welsh Place-Name Society's published work for anything contested. And the Ordnance Survey 1:25,000, which carries more minor names than any other modern map.