A glimpse of the past

FEATURE: A GLIMPSE OF THE PAST A glimpse of the past

Bill Zajac, Cadw’s Legislation and Policy Officer, explains how the List of Historic Place Names of Wales can shed light on a community’s history and the part you can play to add a sense of place to the past.

Some examples of house names from St Martin’s Road, Caerphilly.

As I left the house for my first lockdown walk, I paused to think how lucky I was to be able to get out and enjoy some regular exercise. Yet, what would be new, I thought? After all, we have been living in Caerphilly for years and we frequently walk around our neighbourhood and the town.

I soon realised, however, that what was new was the opportunity to appreciate Caerphilly and what it offers at a slower pace and without the inevitable hum of traffic noise. With the time to look, it is remarkable how much one sees: overlooked place names, intriguing signage or old inscriptions over doorways and on gate posts hinting at a hidden history.

Such discoveries often raise more questions than answers, but if you’d like to find out more, the List of Historic Place Names of Wales — historicplacenames.rcahmw.gov.uk — will help you uncover the history of your community. You can even add your own local knowledge to it too!

The list was launched three years ago after the Historic Environment (Wales) Act 2016 placed a duty upon the Welsh Ministers to compile and maintain a list of historic place names in Wales. The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales undertook this task and created what is still the only statutory list of historic place names in the United Kingdom.

Since that time, the Commission has appointed a full-time curator to oversee the development of the list, which has almost doubled in size to contain nearly 665,000 entries. Moreover, it will continue to grow, since it aims to incorporate more historic names for settlements, buildings, fields and landscape features that can be confidently mapped.

One really useful feature of the website is its mapping element. A collaborative project called Cymru1900Wales (later GB1900) provided the list’s first major tranche of place names. That project enlisted online volunteers to transcribe all of the text, including place names, from the Ordnance Survey’s second-edition County Series 6-inch/mile maps of Wales published between 1899 and 1908. These centuryold maps provide the base upon which the list’s hundreds of thousands of names are plotted.

If, like me, you often want to get an idea of what a locality looked like a century ago, the list is a great place to start. By clicking a button in the top-right corner of the screen, you can toggle between the old maps and current detailed Ordnance Survey mapping. With a place like Caerphilly, a click of the button gives you a glimpse of the past: streets and housing estates vanish and named fields cluster tight around the town centre.

Of course, the list also displays the fascinating historic place names of an area. The place names have been gathered from diverse sources. In addition to the 1900-era maps themselves, hundreds of thousands of field names were contributed by the Cynefin project. The Cynefin volunteers painstakingly gathered a wealth of information from the tithe maps and accompanying schedules that were produced for

more than 95 per cent of Wales between 1838 and 1850. Many other names have come from academic studies and scholarly collections.

However, historic place names are not simply the stuff of maps and academic monographs. They are still integral, living components of Wales’s rich cultural heritage and countless names are yet to be recorded on the list. This is where you can help. Has your family always used the same field names and are they different from the ones on the list? Have you discovered an old house name? Any historic place name that is likely to have originated before the First World War is eligible for consideration.

With every contribution, the list becomes a greater and more valuable resource. It embodies more of the precious legacy of our historic place names, not only recording them for the future, but also providing a sound basis for decision making in the present.

To contribute to the list, get in touch with the curator by using the Contact tab on the website — historicplacenames. rcahmw.gov.uk. Alternatively, click on one of the list’s place name tabs and then on the name itself to leave a comment on that name; this is particularly useful if you want to record a variant or an alternative to an existing name.

Case study: the story of St Martin’s Road

Caerphilly’s St Martin’s Road took its name from the chapel of ease that stood at its western end. It became Caerphilly’s parish church in 1850 and its rebuilding followed in 1877–79.

The work on the church evidently preceded the development of the road; by the time of the secondedition Ordnance Survey map, only a few of the houses that now line the road had been constructed. However, by the time of the 1911 census, the street was lined with houses and most had been given names as part of their postal addresses.

Many of those names can no longer be directly related to the properties, so they will not be able to be included on the list. During one of my strolls, however, I noticed two sets of names carved over doors and another name on a gate post. With those points of reference, I orientated the list of names from the 1911 census and located further surviving names on gate posts and elsewhere. Those names can now make a modest contribution to the list in this small corner of Caerphilly.