Place-Names of Montgomeryshire examines 900 place-names in the historic county of Montgomery (1536-1974) together with the southernmost part of Denbighshire that was transferred to Powys from Clwyd in 1996.

Place-names tell us a lot about how our ancestors lived, their languages and dialects, and how they thought about the world around them but great care must be taken to gather as much written and spoken evidence as possible before attempting to interpret those names. Richard Morgan’s masterful study not only reveals many fascinating explanations of Montgomeryshire’s place-names but also resolves numerous false interpretations:

Montgomery, which gave its name to a Norman castle, town and the former county, is actually a French name transferred from Normandy. To Welsh-speakers it is Trefaldwyn or ‘Baldwin’s town’ and this in turn has given us the Welsh language county name of Maldwyn.

Drenewydd and Newtown both mean ‘new town’ in reference to when the settlement was established at the end of the thirteenth century, not in 1968 when it was declared a new town under the New Towns Act 1965.

Guilsfield has no connection with anyone by the name Giles but is likely to refer to the golden flowers of a genus of hemlock which gave us its Welsh name Cegidfa (‘place of hemlock’).

Meifod is a house or settlement located in the middle of a valley floor (Welsh mei- and bod) not one occupied in May (Welsh Mai).

Based on the author’s own extensive research in local and national archives and reference libraries, and comprehensively arranged under 855 separate entries according to their standard Welsh form with cross-references from any English forms, the place-names are then linked to a glossary of over 1,000 common elements and personal names. This impressive volume also contains a bibliography and guide to the international phonetic alphabet.

Richard Morgan is a former archivist at Powys Archives and Glamorgan Archives. He is author of Place-Names of Glamorgan (Welsh Academic Press 2019) and Place-Names of Carmarthenshire (Welsh Academic Press 2022) and co-authored the Dictionary of the Place-Names of Wales with Professor Hywel Wyn Owen in 2007.