Blaenau Tywi: names in the landscape
This history of the farms and field-names of Blaenau Tywi (the Upper Tywi Valley) was undertaken by volunteers from the Blaenau Tywi/Upper Tywi Valley History Group during 2012-13. The project came about because it was felt that field-names of the locality were being overlooked and forgotten, due to the use of numbers instead of names in modern agricultural practice and by the increased migration of non-Welsh speakers into the area to whom the old Welsh names mean little. We wondered if it would be possible to capture the old names and make them speak again with messages from the past. The names of farms and fields preserve the human compulsion to map our own environment; to order, identify, classify and also to communicate this mirrored world of our experience to others. This need to name things in the landscape is not uniquely Welsh. However, it is in the rural Welsh speaking heartlands of Wales where there is still a strong connection to the land that these names live on, supported by the tenuous thread of oral tradition.
