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The List of Historic Place Names has reached an important new milestone recently - we now have more than 700,000 names. Recently we've been adding names from two sources; the first is A Study of Breconshire Place Names by Richard Morgan and Peter Powell, and the other is two maps of Maes Machreth, a farm near Glantwymyn in Montgomeryshire.

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.

As you'd expect for a website and project on Wales' place names, the Welsh language is very important to us. After all, the vast majority of our place names come from Welsh! There are thousands of people learning Welsh as adults at the moment, from all across Wales and beyond, and we believe that we have a duty to support them in their learning. That's one of the main reasons that we added sound files to the glossary for example, as you can see here.

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.

Second in our series on the most recent sources we have been adding to the List is the Multilayer Map project, or the Deep Mapping Project.

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.

We've spent the past year adding names to the List from various different sources, and now that the work on some of them is complete, we thought it was time to blog about some of the most interesting ones, to give you a closer look at the work of the List.

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.

You'll have noticed that the 1900 OS map is back online after having disappeared for a few weeks. This was the unfortunate result of some licensing and technological changes under the bonnet that we didn't have control over. We're very pleased to be able to report that the problems have been sorted, and that the technology has been updated. In fact, we're hoping to be able to upload new layers of historic mapping in the future. We apologise for any difficulties that the lack of a map has been causing.

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.