Upland Place-Names – Beacon Hill Research

Upland Place-Names – Aled Williams Publishes Beacon Hill Research

The culmination of a three year study into the upland place-names of north-east Radnorshire has been published by the Radnorshire Society in their annual journal ‘The Transactions of the Radnorshire Society’.

The Transactions of the Radnorshire Society 2015 and 2016

The research has been conducted by Aled Williams whose interest in place-names emanated from his hill-walking activities.  His attention has also been drawn to many of the other upland areas of Wales and its borders, which has enhanced hill list publications such as ‘Y Pedwarau – The 400m Hills of Wales’, ‘The Fours – The 400m Hills of England’ and ‘Y Pellennig – The Remotest Hills of Wales’, all of which are co-authored with Myrddyn Phillips.

As a native of Porthmadog, Aled’s research originally concentrated on his local area of Eryri, but this soon expanded to the whole of Wales.  During this research a select few areas received intense research, both on a local level with farmers, landowners, shepherds, gamekeepers, local historians and academics being contacted and on an historical level with Ordnance Survey maps, tithe maps, enclosure maps, estate maps and other historical documents all being analysed and catalogued. One of these select few areas that Aled has concentrated on has been the hills of Radnorshire, a Welsh county that borders with the English counties of Shropshire and Herefordshire.

Extract from the 2015 Transactions

Radnorshire holds interest to a person researching place-names as it is one of the areas that forms the border country with England, because of this many names have either been anglicised or cymricised.  This provides a Welsh speaker like Aled a fascinating task of recording current pronunciations and deducing meanings.

The Radnorshire Society was established in 1930 with the intention to document the archaeology and history of the historic county of Radnorshire, which now forms a part of Powys.  The Society has an archive and library and organises excursions and public lectures, and as well as the annual journal, the ‘Transactions’, an illustrated newsletter through the Field Section of the Society is also published.

The wilds of Beacon Hill with one person standing on the summit beside its triangulation pillar

The Transactions are published in a bound volume and incorporate academic research and archive material in what is considered to be the county’s pre-eminent scholarly publication.  This journal is held in high regard by the scholarly community, as evidenced by volumes 1 - 74 (1931 -2004) having been made freely available via ‘Welsh Journals Online’, a site hosted by the National Library of Wales.

Extract from the 2016 Transactions

The articles that the Society has published on Aled’s research are entitled ‘Upland Place-Names in North-East Radnorshire: Beacon Hill’, with ‘Part 1’ appearing in the 2015 Transactions and ‘Part 2’ in the 2016 Transactions.  The majority of this blog’s readership will recognise Beacon Hill as a 547m high Marilyn, Hump, Dewey, Uchaf and Twmp.  Those with a particular fondness to this hill will find interest in the names published in these journal articles.

Looking south from the lower slopes of the Beacon Hill range

The research is presented with the name, grid reference, number of informants, documented sources and detailed explanatory text, with each name and its relevant detail appearing in the same systematic way, and forms a current day comprehensive catalogue of the upland place-names of the area taking in Beacon Hill.

These two volumes are not yet digitised but hard copy versions of the Transactions may be available to purchase via the Radnorshire Society’s library.  For further information visit: http://radnorshiresociety.org/transactions/