The talk opens with James January McCann explaining why the Historic Place Names of Wales project exists. The reason is simple: Wales is losing its historic place names, more precisely… historic Welsh language place names and historic English place names are being replaced by new names.
He illustrates this with examples. “Vardre Vagh… is attested in written sources at least 500 years back,” yet it has been renamed Happy Donkey Hill.
Plas Glisifan, once a home of the Watkin Williams Wynn dynasty, was marketed as Wimborne Hall on the assumption that a Welsh name would not sell.
In Cwm Eigion, a farm embedded in a coherent valley naming system—Bwlch, Blaen Aelun, Pistyll Aelun—was rebranded Sea View Mountain for tourists. Pontbren Ddu, named for the dark footbridge beside it, became Little Pudding Cottage. These new names now appear on Ordnance Survey maps.
This leads James to explain the role of the Ordnance Survey (OS). OS insists it is not the official naming authority, yet its maps are treated as definitive. Their procedures include accepting a new name from the owner of the house or land. OS has also begun lifting names from climbers’ websites, treating recreational route names as landscape names. As a result, English climbing names such as Mordor, Looning the Tube and Parsley Gully now appear across areas where the historic naming tradition is entirely Welsh.
To address this, the Historic Environment (Wales) Act 2016, updated in 2023, requires Welsh ministers to maintain a national list of historic place names. If someone wishes to rename a house, the council checks whether the existing name is at least 100 years old. If it is, the owner is asked to reconsider and given information on Welsh heritage and language. After a ten‑day cooling‑off period, they may still proceed, but the original name is permanently recorded so future owners can restore it. The list is also used to name new streets and housing developments, drawing on historic field names, streams and vanished farms rather than invented labels.
James then describes the project’s sources, beginning with the tithe maps of the 1830s and 1840s, the largest single source in the database. Created to assess land for church tithes, they record every field and farm, preserving thousands of names that would otherwise be lost. These maps form the backbone of the project’s evidence base.
The project is working. Research shows a rise in requests for Welsh street names between 2018 and 2023, and most house‑name changes across Wales are now English‑to‑Welsh. The online list contains over 724,000 names, safeguarding linguistic heritage and keeping Wales’s historic landscape alive.
The Royal Commission is currently digitising and geolocating all surviving enclosure maps. Once this work is complete, James plans to extract every place name recorded on them and add the entire set to the national database. This will significantly expand the historic naming evidence, especially for rural areas where enclosure maps preserve names found nowhere else.
