The subject of place-names has become a hot topic here in Cymru, especially over the past year or so. Last spring we had the manufactured fuss over the rebranding of the Brecon Beacons National Park which involved using only the Cymraeg form Bannau Brycheiniog. The hand-wringing that this would somehow lead to plummeting tourist numbers appears at this early stage not to have come to pass and indeed the New York Times cited the increased focus on Welsh language and culture by the National Park Authority when including Y Bannau at number 18 on its list of 52 places to visit in 2024.
Recently, I was successful in the ballot for a place to run the most iconic and scenic marathon in this country, which circumnavigates the highest mountain in the land. Until recently it was known as Snowdonia Marathon, but the email that dropped into my inbox referred to it only as Marathon Eryri, but I admit I have instinctively but erroneously referred to it as Snowdon or Snowdonia Marathon at least once or twice. My wife thought it involved actually running up to the summit, an error that might have been less likely if we had embedded the distinction between Eryri (the region) and Yr Wyddfa (the mountain).
Eryri is most likely derived from a word meaning ‘highlands’ but is more romantically often said to mean ‘land of eagles’, eryr being the cymraeg for that magnificent bird that was persecuted to extinction in most of Britain south of the Scottish highlands by the mid nineteenth century, while Yr Wyddfa — the tumulus or burial mound — is derived from Yr Wyddfa Rhitta, the resting place of Rhitta Gawr, one of the great giants of Arthurian legend. I think most people would agree that’s got a bit more going for it, if only from tourist marketing point of view, than the rather prosaic Snowdon, especially as most of the year visitors will be disappointed to find even the high summit lacking the eponymous white stuff. Nevertheless, the language geek that sits proudly on my sleeve is happy to have discovered that the ‘-don’ suffix is derived from an Old English word for hill, as in, possibly, London, and more certainly Abingdon, and in the form ‘down’ (as in the South Downs), but which is in turn derived from a Brythonic word , reflecting the ancient Celtic history of these islands.
Now, a movement is gaining pace to dispense with the name ‘Wales’ and use Cymru for all official purposes. A petition to the Senedd to this effect has gained over 11,000 signatures, but it seems to me more likely that the widespread adoption of the name, even in English contexts, will more likely be propagated by its organic adoption by the likes of the Football Association of Wales, which for a long time has referred to the national teams as Cymru even in its English language communications.
Of course there are plenty of fiercely patriotic Cymry (welsh folk - though not all would recognise the term) who are happy to refer to their country as Wales and themselves as Welsh. Many of them might resent this Sais telling them that perhaps they ought to rethink being ‘Welsh’, since ‘Wales’ is derived from an Anglo-Saxon word essentially meaning ‘foreigner’, or ‘that lot over there’, while ‘Cymru’ denotes something like ‘fellow countryfolk’, with an ultimate root in common with, well, common, and community, and communion.
I am broadly sympathetic to the idea that place-names should honour indigenous language and culture, particular in contexts where that has been suppressed. Few have had a problem with shifting to using Mumbai or Kyiv (I even found that my favourite cheesy garlicky freezer staple has been rebranded to Spinach and Mushroom Kyiv, though I understand that apart from at Sainsbury’s, the non-woke chicken versions are mainly still siding with the Russians).
That latter example, though, points to the kind of counter-argument that in almost any situation has my radical certainty wavering within seconds of my first fixing upon it. I think if ever I were ennobled and granted a coat of arms, which wouldn’t happen because I would refuse it, my motto would be ‘Yes, but’. Well, I say I’d refuse it, but wouldn’t it be kind of cool to be Lord Heald of … where would I go for? It would have to be something that united my Yorkshire origins and Celtic inheritance. The obvious choice is Craven (I grew up in the district of West Craven, my dad was editor of the Craven Herald and Craven was a British (ie. Celtic) kingdom that survived into Anglo-Saxon times), but it turns out there are already Earls of Craven, starting with the son of a poor lad from Appletreewick in the Yorkshire Dales who made good down south and became Lord Mayor of London. One of their issue built Craven Cottage — amazing it’s taken me till now to find out why Fulham’s football ground is so-named.
And that ‘yes, but…’ turned as it invariably does into a knotty tangle of densening thoughts about the socio-political implications of toponymy, and in all too typical fashion, the googly rabbit warrens I’ve wriggled through, and the honeypots I’ve consequently got my head stuck in, as a result of following up some the factoids above (I’d hitherto taken the Eryri/eagle etymology for granted, but now I know better, albeit for the worse) have delayed my original intention here, which had been to recount a small and rather banal tale about our home address.
Here is the street sign marking the road where I live:
Or perhaps you could also say it’s the road sign marking the street where I live, because ffordd has the primary meaning of ‘road’ or ‘way’ etc. (though it can mean ‘street’) while heol means ‘street’ (as does stryd, incidentally) with secondary meaning of ‘road’ or ‘way’ etc. But wait — what does heol have to do with anything? You may ask.
So let’s back up for a moment. A few years ago, after moving to Llanelli, I began learning Cymraeg. The first flush of rapid progress soon stalled, and I have remained plateaued on the lowlands of being able to hold a basic conversation about the fact I’m learning Cymraeg, which may have been impressive a couple of months in but is wearing pretty thin by now.
Nevertheless, I continue to express my solidarity with the project to sustain and revive the language as best I can as an entry-level learner, cheerily greeting people with a bore da on my dog walks, and always saying diolch to providers of services and hold-openers of doors. As one of the run-directors of our local parkrun I was the first to inject a homeopathic dose of bilingualism into the pre-run briefing; I ensured that our local athletic club now has bilingual branding, and I edged snippets of my nascent Cymraeg into poetry, both on the page or screen and at spoken word events.
I also began using the language in transactional situations within my, admittedly very limited, comfort zone: selecting the ‘Cymraeg’ option at ATMs and (with a little more jeopardy) self-checkouts, and (when given the option) in the drop-down menus of e-commerce sites and the like. And here is where it got interesting (in a Dull Men’s Club kind of way) because when selecting my address from these drop-down menus, which occasionally offer Welsh as the first (and rarely the only) option, it appeared not as Ffordd Frenhines Victoria, but Heol y Frenhines Victoria.
This made little practical difference, of course. If asked to quote my address verbally I would invariably take the line of least resistance and choose English to avoid the hassle of having to spell it out. If inputting the address manually I would sometimes opt for the ‘Ffordd’ variant to honour the street sign.
On the whole, as far as I can tell, stuff arrived at the house regardless of the form of address; after all, just a number and postcode is enough to pinpoint us in reality. There was one time when I missed a DPD parcel delivery and chose the redelivery option. I can’t recall the precise details of how things proceeded from there but the vendor must have used the English address and at some point in the redelivery process I provided, whether deliberately or from a drop-down menu, the Cymraeg version. They had an app where you could track the delivery in real time, so I was able to stand at the window and watch him drive past without stopping. I ended up driving over to the Swansea depot the next day rather than risking another fly-past. When I had a bit of a grumble at the depot guy he made the excuse that it was because I had rearranged delivery to a different address which wasn’t authorised by the vendor. (So why was it loaded back on the van and driven past my house? I didn’t think to ask.)
“But it wasn’t a different address,” I objected, pointing out the identical postcode and the fact that the driver had successfully reached the location but just hadn’t stopped, “it was just the Welsh version of my address.”
“Well there’s your problem,” he muttered in his rich Swansea accent, “we don’t speak Welsh here.”
That’s the only true confusion I’ve ever encountered over the address, and it wasn’t linked to the hair’s breadth distinction between ‘ffordd’ and ‘heol’. These are the sorts of words that can’t simply be mapped one-to-one with English as there no definitive boundaries within English between terms such as ‘road’, ‘street’, ‘way’, ‘avenue’, ‘drive’ and so on. Although there is a clustering of connotations that can make one term more likely than another in a given context (‘roads’ are more likely to to be main thoroughfares from one place to another, where ‘streets’ are more often purely residential, for example), changes in urban development and linguistic fashion over time, and other less obvious social and regional factors can influence street naming, and consequently, and conversely, street names can have significant social — and therefore economic — value.
Studies of house price variation show that on average it is more expensive to buy property on a ‘lane’ than a ‘road’, with ‘street’ and ‘terrace’ at the bottom of the value pile, and lofty names such as ‘rise’ and ‘hill’ , together with aristocratic sounding terms such as ‘avenue’ and ‘drive’ boosting values by six-figure zooms over the average. No wonder there are so many new-build ‘mews’ that have never seen a horse. I’m not yet familiar enough with Welsh toponymy to know if similar socioeconomic factors are at play here.
It appears that the crossover between ‘heol’ and ffordd’ is even less clear cut than between, say, ‘road’ and ‘street’ both semantically and socially. There seems to be quite a strong regional variation, with ‘heol’ more common in the south and ‘ffordd’ in the north. The sample size is admittedly small, but there are certainly far more ‘Heol’s than ‘Ffordd’s here in Llanelli on the south coast, according to a Post Office list of bilingual street names I stumbled across.
You can see that there Queen Victoria Road is listed as Heol y Frenhines Victoria, and this discrepancy, manifesting itself in the need to make real-life (albeit inconsequential) choices with delivery companies and the like continued to pique my curiosity until eventually I decided to do something about it.
I found the email address for the department within Cyngor Sir Gâr / Carmarthenshire County Council responsible for street names and dropped them an email. I acknowledged that addressing the issue of whether a street in this proud and ancient Celtic nation should be named in honour of an Anglo-German colonialist monarch at all might be opening a can of worms too far, and limited my enquiry to the Ffordd/Heol distinction (with a side order of Victoria/Fictoria — there is no ‘v’ in the Cymraeg alphabet so I had seen the ‘F’ version used with both Heol and Ffordd in one place or another. I have to confess to a sneaking satisfaction at seeing the victory-V in Victoria being made to F off, and it reminded me of the colonialist reasons behind the most common surname in Wales being ‘Jones’ despite there historically being no ‘j’ either in the Welsh alphabet, though it appears to have been grudgingly admitted for a handful of loan words such as jeli and garej ).
Anyway, I got a reply to my email from someone called Huw asking, to my surprise, if he could call me to discuss it, which, as something of a phone-phobic I found mildly anxiety inducing, but curiosity was sufficient to overcome that.
It turns out that Huw is in the right job. My query was, apparently, just the sort of thing he loves to deal with. He confirmed, as the representative of the statutory body charged with street names in Carmarthenshire, that the official ‘correct’ form was Ffordd Frenhines Llanelli, and he’d already spent a good a couple of hours unsuccessfully trying to get to the bottom of why the Royal Mail database (and consequently all the companies and organisations to which it is sold) has for decades incorrectly used ‘Heol y’ rather than ‘Ffordd’, and he was amazed that no-one had thought to raise the issue before. I don’t suppose anyone ever will be able to determine how the error was introduced, but a few days later I did get a further response from Huw, saying:
Good morning, Mr Heald. Royal Mail have confirmed that they’ve corrected their records and it will be showing by the end of the month. They have no control over how often third party companies update their records, but hopefully as and when courier services etc. update theirs, the problem will slowly be rectified.
Just to clarify, your official address is –
38 Ffordd Frenhines Victoria / Queen Victoria Road, Llanelli, SA15 2TH
So now I know. I mean I really know.
All that remains is to see if we can get the obsolete county of Dyfed changed as the default name that obliterates Carmarthenshire (and Pembrokeshire, and Ceredigion) from most address databases created using Postcode Address File alias data sold to companies by Royal Mail (The issue was raised in Parliament as far back as 2009 but still hasn’t been sorted. Flushed with my victory over the Ffordd/Heol confusion I’m pretty sure I ought to be able to vanquish this problem too, right?).
And then to see what can be done about the inconsistent bilingualism of street names. Why, for instance, within yards of my home, is Victoria / Fictoria’s consort Albert honoured only by the anglophone moniker ‘Street’:
As is whichever princess gave her title to:
Whereas, just off Princess Street, converted from the building that was once the storehouse for Llanelli’s late lamented Pugh’s Department Store, we have:
I can feel another email coming on.
Prepare to have your day made, Huw.
Postscript (to this script-about-post post).
Regular visitors to the London Writers’ Salon writers’ hours may well have noticed how long this post has been rattling around my head. It very obviously isn’t worth, in itself, the time and effort that have been expended on it. And then there’s that yawning time gap between the (admittedly kind of ironic, though I sort of hoped I might be able to mean it this time) ‘new year new me’ post, and this one finally seeing the light of day.
But while writing, and not writing, this piece, and doing, and not doing, a bunch of other stuff that’s cropped up, I’ve been doing a lot of (maybe, at times, too much) thinking, and in the interstices of this post are themes of identity, language, place and belonging that I’ve been thinking about, and now want to explore further by returning to the lighthouse themed work that I’ve now determined will become my first book-length piece. And maybe even my first book.
Please do keep watching this space, however futile it must usually feel, for bits of work and thinking in progress as I experiment with stuff towards making that happen.