700,000 names!

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.