The first thing to remember is that the vast majority of names are readily understandable for the fluent Welsh speaker. This however does not particularly help those people who don’t (currently!) speak Welsh. The two most asked questions about Welsh language place names are 1. What does it mean, and 2. How do you say it?

All place names are made up of elements, the individual building blocks that are put together to construct a particular name. These are words like tref, bryn, coed, mawr a bach. On our website we’ve compiled a glossary of the most common of these elements, with a translation into English, so that you can understand them. We’ve also given a few examples of these elements in use in various place names. This is particularly important because, as you may know, the first letters of Welsh words can change in a variety of ways, due to the grammatical rules of the language. This is referred to in English as initial consonant mutation, or treiglo in Welsh, and is characteristic of all the modern Celtic languages. It may sound complicated at first, but it’s actually fairly simple once you get used to it. We’ve also provided an audio file of each element being pronounced, in order to help you learn to say the names properly.

Of course, that still doesn’t help with those names who’s meanings might not be readily apparent. Most often this is down to the natural evolution and slurring of a name over the centuries. Brymbo in Flintshire is a great example of this. The name was originally Bryn y baw, but the two elements bryn and baw (dung,flith) have been pushed together in speech, and then baw has been de-voiced due to the emphasis in the word being placed on the first element. A similar process has occurred with Abermawddach, which slowly became Abermaw and then Y Bermo, anglicised to Barmouth. The only way, in these circumstances, to identify the correct meaning of the place name is to ensure that you have consulted the full range of historical attestations of the name, and particularly the earliest ones. Once you’ve done this you’ll be able to see how the name has developed over the centuries, and hopefully to discover it’s meaning.

Be careful! Some forms might suggest a particular etymology which is then contradicted by earlier forms. A good example of this is Lunnon on the Gower, which is recorded as Llwynon in Edward Lhuyd’s Parochialia in 1699. Unfortunately, earlier spellings, such as Lunan in 1322 do not support this interpretation.

It’s also very important to remember that most place names have fairly pedestrian meanings; they refer to landscape characteristics or things in it. Despite this, people are very fond of ascribing romantic or dramatic meanings to their local place names. Almost every place with coch in its name for instance, will be explained as having come about because there was a battle there, and the gwaed coch of the soldiers who died there stained the place red. The truth is unfortunately rather more prosaic; quite often it’s a reference to the colour and condition of the soil locally.

It's also worth mentioning that the thing the place name refers to may no longer exist. We know for example that Wales has been largely deforested over the centuries, but many names survive that attest to the presence of now disappeared woodland. If you come across a name with coed or prysg in it far away from any modern woodland for example, it is likely to refer to a wood that has been lost over the course of history. Some good examples of these are Cerrig yr Argoed on the uppers slopes of Dyffryn Ogwen, and Argoed Fawr, a farm above Talybont in Ceredigion. These two names give an indication of how far up the hillsides the trees used to reach.

All this explains why we’re constantly adding more and more names to our database, and why we display everything all at once on the map. The more information people have about the development of place names, the more easily they’ll be able to understand them.

We've been doing a bit of technical development work on the website recently, and all of the changes are now live. As you can see in the above picture, we've added a new button on the left hand side of the screen. This will allow people to find the co-ordinates of anywhere in Wales. All you need to do is click on the button outlined in red in the picture. That will change the cursor. If you then click on the map, a popup will appear with the co-ordinates.

If you send us the name, co-ordinates and the date of the name (that is, as far as you know, the year since which that name has been used), we'll add them to the List as soon as possible. When you're finished searching for co-ordinates, click on the button on the left again, and the cursor will return to normal. We really hope that this will be a clear and easy way for the public to take part in the project, and to enable us to collect more names which don't exist on maps or in documents, but survive in the memories of the people.

You can see the names here.

It's important to remember that history is an ongoing process, and that things which are modern now will be historic one day. That's why we collect contemporary names, as well as historic forms, so that nothing is lost. A good example of this is the map that we came across in Felinwynt, Ceredigion, which shows the names of all of the houses in the area, some historic, some modern. We've added the names to the List, and we want to do the same in other areas of the country, so if your Community Council or your village has a map of local place names, please take a photo and send it in to us.

A Study of Breconshire Place Names was published in 1999, and contains historic forms of 340 Welsh language names from the county, as well as a description of their etymology. We're still working on uploading all the forms from the book, but so far we've got 555 of them in the List. They add to our understanding of the development of the names of Breconshire's towns, villages, mountains and rivers, and there's a few house names in the mix as well. 

The family at Maes Machreth were kind enough to give us an old map of the farm, dating from 1857, which shows the names of the fields. We're also lucky that the field names were recorded by the Tithe in 1841, so we can show that there wasn't much change in the decade and a half between the two. However, the family have also given us a modern map, showing the names which are currently in use, and there's been a fair bit of change in the intervening 180 years. Cae'r lloi is now Barnfield, Gwerglodd Adam has become Cae Maen and some names have changed location, such as Cae ogof, which has moved across the road and replaces the name Cae pen y geulan.

Continuing with field names, we're currently in discussions with Rural Payments to collect current field names, so we hope, in the near future, to be able to see how Wales field names have changed since the Tithe, and perhaps even to fill in some of the gaps that weren't recorded by the Tithe Commissioners.

We've also set out to preach the importance of Welsh place names, and the work of the List, directly to learners, through giving talks to Welsh for Adults classes. We contacted the Canolfan Dysgu Cymraeg Cenedlaethol, the national centre for Welsh for adults, and offered talks for classes at Uwch or Gloywi level.

We've spoken to four classes already this year, with more on the way, but as per usual with us, we want to reach as many people as possible, so if you're a Welsh teacher, or a learner, contact us through the contact form. We can offer talks either face to face or on Zoom, so that they're suitable for every class. 

The talks are tailored to focus on place names that are (reasonably) local to the learners, so every talk is different. Give it a try!

As well as the talks to classes, James has also begun a monthly column on Lingo360, the online magazine for learners. Each article is provided with a glossary, so that you can follow the article irrespective of your level of Welsh.  Two articles have been published so far; the first is a general introduction to the work of the project, which you can find here. The second is a discussion of the name Llanbrynmair, a village in Powys, and how it's moved down the valley over the past century, which can be found here.

Deep Mapping Estate Archives is an Arts and Humanities Research (AHRC) funded collaborative project across Welsh universities, archives, and heritage institutions. The project has digitally mapped historical records to the real-world locations they relate to, which allows for in-depth analysis of landscape continuity and change.

This pilot project has been focused on a small area of North East Wales consisting of three parishes in Denbighshire; Llanarmon yn Iâl, Llanferres and Llandegla and three adjacent parishes in Flintshire; Treuddyn, Nercwys and Mold (as far as the river Alyn). The project has brought together a wide range of large-scale historical maps to create a free, publicly accessible web map: 

• 1869-1874 | Ordnance Survey County Series Mapping (25.344 inches to 1 statue mile or 1:2,500)
• 1871 | Ordnance Survey Town Plan (126.72 inches to 1 statue mile or 1:500)
• 1837-1848 | Tithe Survey Mapping (Various scales)
• 1800-1830 | Enclosure Mapping (Various scales)
• 1620-1858 | Estate Mapping (Various scales)

The web map presents digitised scanned images of the original historical maps which have been geographically aligned to the modern map using a process called georeferencing. Each map source has also been 'vectorised'. This means that shapes (polygons) matching the lines drawn on the historical maps have been created digitally, allowing users to click on any landscape feature (field parcel, building, road) to get further information.

The pilot project has now ended, and the results of the research can be seen on the project website. You can discover more about the project by listening to the lecture given by Jon Dollery and Scott Lloyd from the Royal Commission here.

All the maps contain place names, all of which, some 2,000 odd, have now been added to the List. This means that we now have a very decent understanding of the development of the place names in the project area, since we now have lots of names from the Parochialia, the Tithe, and various early maps from this area of the North-East. You can find all of the names collected by the project here.

The first source is the Mynegai i Enwau Lleoedd y Canu Barddol, which we received through the generosity of Prof. Ann Parry-Owen. The name means index to the place names of bardic poetry, and as it suggests, these names come from the huge corpus of medieval Welsh poetry edited by the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth. The poems are split into two series, Canu Beirdd y Tywysogion, the Poets of the Princes, who sang to the rulers of independent Wales, and Canu Beirdd yr Uchelwyr, the Poets of the Nobility, after the loss of independence.

As you'll know if you've been following the List since the beginning, there are already lots of medieval names in it, many of them also provided by the Centre. Most of them are Latin forms of Welsh place names, as well as some Norman and early English ones, reflecting the status of Latin as the language of the Church and of administration, and Anglo-Norman as the language of the Norman conquerors. What makes the names from the Mynegai is the fact that they are all in the Welsh language, thus allowing us to see the development of the names of our towns and villages over the centuries. As well as this, we've got Welsh names for places where only English names survive today, names for places which no longer exist, and names which have changed so much that we weren't able to definitively locate them, such as Abermenwenfer in Tywyn, Meirionydd.

One popular theme in the poetry was to praise the splendour of the patron's house, which of course, necessitated using its name. A large number of these houses are still extant, which means that the names from the Mynegai allow us to trace their history back centuries. A good example of this is Mathafarn in Dyffryn Dyfi near Machynlleth, which dates back to at least c.1317. The poets sang to patrons all across Wales, and in those areas now in England which were Welsh speaking at the time, such as Pengwern around Oswestry, Colunwy around Clun, and Ergyng in western Herefordshire, so we've got medieval names from all around the country. We've probably got some local to you! You'll notice that we've included some of these names from England, if they were close to the border, in order to show that Wales used to be bigger than she is now, and that the Welsh language was spoken everywhere.

Keep an eye on the blog for information about the other sources we've been dealing with recently.

One frequent response that we received in the questionnaires we put out was that the search function needed to be improved and simplified, so that you didn't need to spell the name you were looking for exactly as it appears in the List in order to find anything. In other words, that you can ignore hyphens. This has now been done, and the search function is now easier to use than ever, so we're sure that you'll be able to find even more information!

As well as this, we've also added the ability to search by postcode, so you can find the names near your house more easily. We hope that these changes will improve your experience of using the List, and lead to you spending even more time browsing it.

After five years of hard work, we’ve enjoyed a great deal of success. The List now contains just under 700,000 names from 1,254 sources and local authorities are using our data and keeping historic place names alive when naming roads, developments and properties. We’ve given dozens of public talks on place names, online and in person, and some of them are available on the Royal Commission’s YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffbsi20cfa4 Public recognition of the importance of historic place names has grown since the establishment of the List, but nid da lle gellir gwell, as we say in Welsh.

The fifth anniversary of the List has given us an opportunity to take stock and gauge the opinion of the public and the experts as to how we can strengthen the List and promote it more effectively so that as many people as possible in Wales can learn about our place names. The public filled in a questionnaire giving their views about improving the List, and we formed a task and finish group with representatives from the Welsh Government, local authorities, the Welsh Language Commissioner’s Office and the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies to consider the next steps. This process is now finished, and you can find the task and finish group’s report here: https://rcahmw.gov.uk/five-year-report-the-list-of-historic-place-names/ The recommendations range from improving the functionality of the List, through cultivating fruitful partnerships, to using the List’s resources to develop the National Curriculum. By following the report’s recommendations, we will be able to develop the List further and make sure that Wales’ wealth of place name heritage is kept safe for generations to come.

You can find the Parochialia names arranged by volume here:

Volume one: https://historicplacenames.rcahmw.gov.uk/placenames/search?q=&cty=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&src=38f920f0-e6d3-463d-a909-14fe9408ec92&yrf=&yrt=

Volume two: https://historicplacenames.rcahmw.gov.uk/placenames/search?q=&cty=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&src=90b9eca5-448e-437b-a828-71fbda65a251&yrf=&yrt=&s=1&ps=10

Volume three: https://historicplacenames.rcahmw.gov.uk/placenames/search?q=&cty=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&src=2b91c097-4836-4442-886e-c38d9ef29fd0&yrf=&yrt=&s=1&ps=10

Or if you would prefer to look at everything all together, you can do so here: https://historicplacenames.rcahmw.gov.uk/placenames/search?q=&cty=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&src=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&yrf=1699&yrt=1699&s=1&ps=10

Edward Lhuyd, the creator of the Parochialia was one of the most important figures of his age, and a huge contributor to scholarship in the fields of Welsh and Celtic Studies. Whilst Curator of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, he sent three copies of a questionnaire to each parish in Wales asking for linguistic, geographical, onomastic and scientific information about the parish. The responses were published in three volumes in Archeologia Cambrensis in 1908. They are an eclectic mix of languages, ranging from Welsh to English to Latin, sometimes within the same paragraph, but form a treasure trove of information about Wales at the turn of the eighteenth century. We have focused on recording the names themselves, as you would expect, but when a bit of information about the location in question was given, such as the name of the owner or tenant of the house, or a little of the area's history, we have put it in the notes section, as an aid to the historian or the genealogist.

Unfortunately, it has not proven possible to discover the precise location of each name. Many of the parishes, particularly in the north-east and south-east, have changed considerably over the course of the two centuries since the compilation of the Parochialia, and many names have disappeared beneath the towns and industries that sprung up in those areas. Despite this, the names are in the List, and you can find them in the geographical centre of the relevant parish. If you happen to know where one or more of these are, please let us know so that we can put them in the correct places. You can contact us here: https://historicplacenames.rcahmw.gov.uk/contact

The work of adding new names to the List continues; the next source we plan to upload is a collection of papers from Argoed, Talybont, Ceredigion, which were given to us by the owner of the farm. We'll discuss these in more depth once the names have been uploaded.

We've briefed the Senedd, and local government, on how the List can support their work, and how the use of historic place names can overcome some thorny issues in and around naming streets and places. Local authorities and a wide range of public bodies in Wales are making use of our data, and the statistics that we've collected suggest that we've been able to make a difference on the ground, with more people choosing to rethink their initial decision to change a historic place name.

We've given dozens of talks to community groups and historical conferences across the country, and you might have heard us talking about place names on Radio Cymru.

We're very aware, however, that there is still lots to be done. That's why we've launched a user survey on the website, in order to find out how and why you, the public, are using the site, and how you feel that it could be improved. It's vital that as many people as possible respond, so that we can get the best idea possible of how we can work even harder to protect our place name heritage. You can find the survey here: https://form.jotform.com/220324218040338  

However, it had become obvious that we still had some gaps, particularly in Gwynedd and Ynys Môn, where you could clearly see names written on the map, but without a recorded name point. GB1900 is finished now, having collected millions of names from across Britain, so we contacted them to see what Welsh names remained. After removing the names that we already had there were about 10,000 left, which were uploaded to the List at the start of this month and filled all the gaps – no doubt to the great relief of people in the North-West!

Along with the extra names from the Parochialia that were uploaded recently, this means that the List now holds 680,280 names. As well as this we also have some 13,000 names left from the Cynefin Project which have now been transcribed and are ready to upload, meaning that we are close to having 700,000 names, or to put it another way, that we have almost doubled the size of the List in the five years of its existence.

As well as correcting existing misspellings and mis-transcriptions we’ve also been working through the remaing dittos from the Cynefin Project, and hope to finish that, and have those 17,000 names ready for upload by Christmas.

We’ve also received a number of names from members of the public, so thank you very much to everyone who has sent in names to us. We’ll be talking more about those names in the next blogpost.

You can see part of Eilean Leòdhais (Lewes), in Na hEileanan Iar (Western Isles) in the picture above. As the work of cleansing our data has continued, we've noticed that some names appear on the 1900 map which are not included in the List. This problem is particularly acute in Ynys Môn (Anglesey) and Caernarfonshire. We decided therefore to go back to GB1900 and get some more up to date data. They make everything available through open access, so many thanks once again to the GB1900 team for their generosity and fantastic hard work! We've stripped out the data from Scotland and England, and are currently removing those names that we've already got from the dataset. Once that's done, we'll be uploading the new names as soon as possible. 

Many people collecting information for the tithe wrote ‘ditto’ rather than repeating names in order to save time. As well as removing the non-name results, James has also been extracting the dittos, and keeping them to one side. There’s a little over twenty thousand of them, all told. Each datum comes with a link to the original tithe key, so replacing the dittos with the real names will be simple enough, and we intend to do this once the first half million names have been uploaded.

We hope to upload these names on Monday, and we’ll be announcing the news on this blog, and on our Twitter account @RC_EnwauLleoedd, so keep your eyes peeled!

As well as this, we're still working through the Parochialia, and have received a number of names from the parish of Llangynfelyn in Ceredigion, which were collected from members of the public during the Celebrating Llangynfelyn Community Day which was held last Saturday.

We received nearly 900,000 pieces of data from the Library team, and we're currently cleansing them in the hope of uploading them before Christmas. We've already got some 200,000 names form the Cynefin project in the List, which will recieve the same clean-up process as the new ones, in order to make sure that we get rid of all the dittos and the 'house and garden's once and for all. Once this is done, we estimate that there will be roughly a million names from all over Wales protected in the List. We'd like to thank the staff of the National Library, and everyone who volunteered on the Cynefin project for all their work, and for sharing the names with us so that they can be protected for ever, and used both officially and unofficially by authorities and by the public.

Nadolig llawen i chi gyd. Merry Christmas.

Secondly, James spoke about the List, how to use it, and the problems we've faced in compiling it at the Welsh Place Names Society's annual conference.

Thirdly, we've been sent another contribution by a member of the public, a list of field names from Llanilar in Ceredigion, which were collected in 1976. What's interesting about these names is that many of them are different to those recorded on the tithe maps, only 130-odd years later. Take a look!

And finally, the eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that western Carmarthenshire has slowly been changing colour! The points marking individual names were originally supposed to be colour-coded: blue for settlement, yellow for topographical feature, brown for civil parish, green for field, red for unclassified etc. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we were not able to do this for the sources that were in the List at launch, and so currently everything is red, apart from Cynefin, which is green (being fields). However, James has been spending a day a week correcting transcriptions, and changing colours, starting in Carmarthenshire, and has reached the point where the entire western half of the county has been checked and updated. So for an idea of how the List will look as a 'finished project' (it'll never be finished....) head down to western Carmarthenshire.

I want to express my gratitude to the Commission for this opportunity of gaining work experience in a Welsh-speaking environment and especially to the Place Names Officer – Dr. James January McCann for his supervision and further background information that he provided during my internship. I wish all the best to the team of the Commission in all their future projects.  

The Commission has passed the work of inputting the information on to Veronika Todorova from Bulgaria, who is currently a student in the Department of Welsh at Aberystwyth University. She will be undertaking a four week internship in order to assist with the project, and to gain experience of working in a Welsh-medium workplace.