Place‐names in Glamorgan

The acknowledged doyen of Welsh place‐name scholars, Professor Gwynedd O. Pierce was, until his retirement, head of the Department of the History of Wales at the University of Wales, Cardiff. It was Pierce who established strict, academic standards for the elucidation of the complex, often linguistically mixed place‐names of Wales, ousting folk etymologies, antiquarian guesswork, and baseless speculation previously predominant. His work on place‐names in the Dinas Powys Hundred (Pierce 1968) was and is exemplary, and is still near definitive and seminal.

Place‐names in Glamorgan has its origins in a series of weekly articles, written in Welsh under the caption...