Book The South Wales Main Line Part Five Swansea to Llanelly

[Simon]

Just being printed up at Amadeus, the next Wild Swan book in John Hodge's series taking us along the Great Western in South Wales, this part covering both main line and Swansea District lines from Swansea to Llanelly.

112 pp, dust jacketed hardback, printed on quality art paper to usual standards, £29.95

The book will be bound and available in time for the Warley show, which I am attending with the Wild Swan Books stand, ably assisted by David Lane and Kevin Wood


Or available from your favourite railway book supplier and all good book shops too.

This will be the only further new book from Wild Swan this year, but rest assured that there are a number of new book projects being actively worked on for release in 2016.

Simon Castens

Wild Swan Books Ltd

 

[Compton castle]

Great series of books including the north & west route. I heard he is working on an eastern valleys edition

 

[djparkins]

this part covering both main line and Swansea District lines from Swansea to Llanelly.

Should that not be Llanelli?

Quote from Wikipedia -
The spelling 'Llanelly' is an anglicised form which was used until 1966, after which it was changed following a local public campaign.

You might upset the locals!

Llanelly is currently in Monmouthshire.

 

[daifly]

Since the book covers the period prior to 1966, it is probably appropriate. Upsetting a few PC locals is unlikely to affect sales!

 

[Simon]

We have indeed used the historic spelling as it is an historic account, despite one or two full yellow ends in the background of a couple of shots

Simon

 

[djparkins]

Since the book covers the period prior to 1966, it is probably appropriate. Upsetting a few PC locals is unlikely to affect sales!

It WAS mean't to be a light hearted post!

At first though I really thought it was a typo as I had never seen or heard of that spelling before - being a late comer to Wales [1988] . You learn something every day!

DJP/MM[PC]

 

[AJC]

That looks a potentially very interesting volume. The photos will be good, I'm sure. The joys of standardised spellings of placenames - in England, as well as Wales - is that they are generally fairly recent; widely-available national maps generally set most of them. My home town, Yeovil, has about 60 odd variants over the centuries, the earliest of which suggest a totally different etymology to the 'town on the Yeo' that the current version suggests.*

For most of the railway history of the town, Llanelly would be perfectly correct, but generally not the spelling used on the odd occasion that the community was noted in surviving documents, the 'modern' spelling - current in the 12th century, in Welsh - occurs occasionally, but there are perhaps a dozen variants, mostly down to wrestling by anglophones to render the 'll' phonetically on the page... The Melville Richards placename archive datasets give a good overview of these if you're interested in Welsh place names.

Melville Richards Archive Place-Name Database - Agreement

Most of the 'modern' Cymrucisations are very old indeed; certainly older than most English versions and all a lot older than any concept of 'political correctness'.

Adam

* Variants on Saxon words meaning a crooked river seem to be the best attested - it never ceases to surprise me how late the names of minor rivers become set along their whole length.

 

[Wagonman]

I was wondering whether 'PC' in this context meant 'politically correct' or 'Plaid Cymru'...

 

[AJC]

I was wondering whether 'PC' in this context meant 'politically correct' or 'Plaid Cymru'...

Hehe, perhaps, I should have thought of that.

I reckon the driver with most of these placename changes would have been Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, but in any event, all the spellings Llanelly/Llanelli firmly pre-date any of the parties mentioned above.

Adam