Upland Place-Names – Aled Williams Publishes Cilfaesty Research

An article entitled ‘Upland Place-Names in North-East Radnorshire: along the Montgomeryshire Fence’ concerning the place-names found along the border between Montgomeryshire and Radnorshire has been published by the Radnorshire Society, in their annual journal ‘The Transactions of the Radnorshire Society’.

Extract from the ‘Upland Place-Names in North-East Radnorshire: along the Montgomeryshire Fence’

The article is written by Aled Williams and is the culmination of local and historical research he has conducted in the area dominated by Cilfaesty, a 528m high hill recognised by hill walkers as being a Dewey, Uchaf, Dodd, Submarilyn and Hump.

Cilfaesty and Bryn Coch

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 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.

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being contacted and on an historical level with Ordnance Survey maps, tithe maps, enclosure maps, estate maps and other historical documents all being analysed and catalogued.

Radnorshire holds special interest to a person researching place-names as it is one of the areas that forms the border country with England, and 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. In fact, Aled’s extensive work on the nearby 547m high Radnorshire mountain of Beacon Hill was previously published by the Radnorshire Society in two parts and is also recommended for those with an interest in upland place-names: ‘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 research is presented with the name, grid reference, number of informants, documented sources and detailed exoplanetary 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 Cilfaesty.

The article has not yet been 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/