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Publisher: Gomer Press, Llandysul, 2007, £29.99.
ISBN: 978 1 84323 901 7
This handsome volume is the triumphant outcome of a significant research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the School of Welsh, Bangor University and located at the University's Place-Name Research Centre. Dedicated to Professor G. Melville Richards (1910-1973), a pioneer of scientific toponymy in Wales, this hugely important new standard work is authored by Professor Hywel Wyn Owen, Director of the Place-Name Research Centre and Vice President of the Society of Name Studies in Britain and Ireland, and by archivist Richard Morgan of the Glamorgan Record Office, also honorary lecturer in Welsh at the School of Welsh at Bangor University. Their many publications on the place-names of Wales are acknowledged as authoritative, worthily enhancing the scholarly tradition established by outstanding place-name researchers such as Sir Ifor Williams, Professor G. Melville Richards, Professor Bedwyr Lewis Jones and archivist Tomos Roberts. Their work was arduous with few reliable precursors. For two centuries or so, writing on place-names in Wales was largely motivated by eisteddfodic competitions, local and national. The essays entered often depended on folk etymology, legend and guesswork (not always inspired) and often exacerbated by the distortions of spelling perpetrated, as in Scotland and Ireland, by the early nineteenth century cartographers of the Ordnance...