‘Hysbys y dengys y dyn

O ba radd y bo’i wreiddyn’

(Tudur Aled, 15^th century)

[A man will make known

Of what root he is grown]

The thing about roots, as I know from many a heavy afternoon, is their sheer stubbornness. Self-inserted as they are into the marrow of the earth around them, only insistent agency, resolute on removing them from their residence, will suffice in extirpating them. In other words, roots don’t move; they are meant to self-entangle through multitudinous branches and arms into the being of the surrounding soil-world, from which they derive all that is needful for life and to which they also contribute untold services, from stability to sugars.

This reciprocal relationship, we are told, serves as the vital foundation not just of the life of the soil, but also in degrees and ways and via means of connection that ultimately stretch beyond the human imaginative capacity, of the entire living biosphere. Thus do the fulgurations of storm clouds over Amazonia, or the passing of showers in a northern-European April, owe their existence to the obdurate workings of soil-wedded, fungally dosed plant organs incessantly ploughing their mineral trade.

In an era where we are, belatedly, reappreciating our status as biological beings on a (still-)living planet, these facts have great application for any analysis of a sane course of action for our societies. And as the above quotation from Tudur Aled, poetic declaimer and praise-maker in a culture far removed from ours, pithily demonstrates, roots have served powerful metaphorical roles on top of their clear importance in their own right as ubiquitous but overlooked biological entities.

The village in which Tudur Aled was raised lies beneath the whale-backed and entirely uncelebrated hill of Pen-y-mwdwl (‘Head of the Hay-stack’). At one end of the hill’s two-mile-long ridge is Moel Emwnt; at the other, the two holdings of Cefn-y-groes Fawr and Cefn-y-groes Fach. The former name, as far as I can ascertain, either relates to some ‘Edmwnt’ (cf. Edmund) after whom the bald hill was named, or it may just be a local variant of ‘egrmwnt’ or agrimony, a common perennial flower of damp grassland and woodland verges. The latter name, in its two variant forms, most likely alludes to the former presence of a wayside cross, such as remains common in Austria and Italy and other parts of Europe less affected by the Protestant Reformation than burnt-over Wales.

I mention these things simply because in both cases, selected almost entirely at random, we find instructive instances of the way in which places and words impress themselves upon each other; in other words, the way the very roots of words proffer to us much more than meets the eye about the relationship between land and language.

In my book, Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape, I tried to outline in broad brush-strokes the ways in which much about the traditional landscape of Wales ultimately bore the imprint of a fruitful two-way relationship between a low-input human agriculture and the biophysical realities of the land itself.  What I mean is that the ancient woodlands, the hay-and-wildflower meadows, the ‘rhos’ pastures; all tended to occupy those parts of the overall landscape that most suited both the human agents managing the land for their own ends, and the biologically determined requirements and preferences of the (fully or semi-) naturally occurring species of plant, fungus and animal with which people shared the land.

None of this was unique to Wales – though interesting details did of course stand out. But I wanted to go a step further and give space in my account for the generative and restrictive role of culture, broadly defined, in this long-unrolling act of creation and destruction.

Within that culture, which since time out of mind over the vast swathe of the land of Wales has been declaimed and elaborated yn Gymraeg, the relationship between land and language has received particular attention and reflection. ‘Cydymdreiddiad iaith a thir’ is the phrase that, in the 20^th century, asserted the centrality of this relationship; ‘the interpermeation of language and land’. The phrase suggests to me a sense, semi-spiritual in its implications, of a connection between a land and the language of its inhabitants – and of course, the names by which the land is known – so deep that it could not be undone without injurious harm to both parties. This, although hyperbolic in feel to those educated only on the thought-streams of the great cosmopolitan Western traditions, is a sentiment far from unknown across the broad sweep of human cultures.

What, though, would a close examination of our two locales at either end of Haystack Hill suggest when counterpoised with cydymdreiddiad? Certainly, the nature of the places in question, as experienced by the people at the time, were imprinted in the names given to both ends of the hill. Whether Emwnt is Edmund, agrimony, or has some other derivation, we may take it that the connection between Emwnt – or what became the sound eh-moont – and that particular location was seen as significant, freighted in some sense great enough to supplant whatever name had been given to the place beforehand. And the spiritual importance of the wayside cross, burdened and hallowed as the place doubtless was – by the passing prayers, day and night, of people living in worlds, if not locations, as far removed from our own as we might care to imagine – was certainly enough to supplant any other label given to that spot on the brow of the hill, used then as now by people going about their business between the village of Llansannan and Llangernyw, three miles to the west.

The land, as we can suppose it was used by those in the late Middle Ages, thus pressed some of its most salient characteristics (the presence of a wayside cross; the presence of agrimony or an association with Edmwnt) on the names it thenceforth bore. Those names then continued to be in use – even after, as in this case and many others – the original reasons for their giving had long since passed out of mind and historical reality.

That is very much par for the course in language, composed as it always is of layers of accreted usage recycling defunct metaphor alongside error, correction and false correction. But the very commonplaceness of the account I have just given means it merits further consideration. For in this case, as in others, the names define place quite regardless of the continued presence or not of that which they originally signified (a physical wayside cross, for instance, at which people prayed) – but they also create in and of themselves both continuity and the illusion of continuity, which are both significant.

On an escarpment, high above and at a slight remove from the village of Cwm in Ebbw Vale, lies the ancient oak woodland of Deri Merddog – ‘The Merddog Oaks’. The place is only accessible with difficulty, on steeply sloping land that overlooks what was formerly the greatest steel working site in the world, a foundry that ate women and men alive while providing the cold metal that powered the world’s first era of mass industrialisation.

But in this biotope in which oak-dominated woodland vies with beech-dominated, we can take it that the place’s moniker is an accurate description of the woodland’s state in the 19^th century, when the name was first recorded – and quite possibly much before then. Today, the woodland continues to be oak-dominated; and so we have the literary foil for which I was looking. An oak woodland bearing the transparent name of Oak-wood.

Except, we probably do not. For in all sorts of significant ways, the oakwood of today is nothing like the oakwood of the 19^th century. That oak woodland would have been intensively managed, coppiced – possibly pollarded – and almost certainly harvested for pit props. And the oakwood of the 17^th century (and we know the woods were more extensive in these parts before industry sprang up; so survivors would almost certainly have been present in those former times) would, by contrast, have been less intensively managed in those ways, but heavily used for the important crop of acorns through pigs, and pannage as well as for gathering of kindling, fencing and building materials and much else besides. None of which is remotely the case today, when its use is to provide breathing space for nature.

And so; the very stability of the name belies the shifting nature of what was in fact present in that place.

But there is also continuity. The oaks remained at Deri Merddog, and in many other places too the name itself, and all the accretions of meaning attached and imputed to that name, created self-sustaining truths. Take ‘Eryri’ (or Snowdonia), the origins of which as a word are entirely unknown, or at most postulated based on sparse references in early medieval texts. Yet because of a seemingly transparent correspondence with the common noun ‘eryr, pl. eryrod’ (eagle; eagles), and the sense inherent in calling a prominent upland area of peaks after eagles – which would have undoubtedly been present in far greater numbers at the time of the first recorded use of the name in 1191 than in our day – the assumed etymology stuck. Then, by a quirk of what we may, synecdochally and slightly uncharitably, call ‘extended town planning’ in the post-war period, the new Eryri/ Snowdonia brand was extended far beyond the reaches of anything known by that name a decade or two earlier, into the reaches of southern Eifionydd and even northern Penllyn (the area around Bala). With reference then to what became a widely recognised and ostensibly learned etymological fact – the area of the national park encompassing most of modern-day Gwynedd being called ‘Eryri’, and that reflecting the former prominence of eagles within its bounds – at various times and in manifold ways, the arguments for the reintroduction of different species of eagles into this area have been supported.

I like this example, because there are in fact a number of good reasons why the careful reintroduction of various species of eagle should be supported, not least in that area of Wales; and the area in question – eryri or not – has most certainly supported greater populations of eagles in the past than now. But in this case, those arguments ought not rest on the area’s supposed etymology.

It is a case of the word’s roots, somehow, themselves working to create continuity. Quite above and beyond the realm of hard facts.

Gwreiddiau newydd

Words can, then, provide roots where they were absent. Through folk etymologies, yes, but also I think of surnames, lovingly shared, roughly foisted upon or otherwise given to individuals, families and even clans during processes of adoption and also cases of cultural colonization. Or indeed some of the more inspired journeys we are taken on through the genius of marketing culture; and much else besides.

And, interestingly, these newly ‘given’ or ‘adopted’ roots (for the agency clearly lies on both sides, or should) themselves enable transformation. The colonized Roman colony that becomes a second Rome. The child adopted into a family, whose name she then bears, and whose proudest scion she becomes.

I think here of my own garden, which I know from many a heavy afternoon, which bears my imprint and the imprint of which I now bear in my bones. That garden was, before we adopted it (or vice versa), a lifeless expanse of gravel spread over impermeable, fossil-derived tarpaulin, and across which dogs were invited to run and defecate.

It was, more than my own manual labour, the incessant work of many roots over a period of years that transformed that erstwhile bleak expanse, by three springs ago, into a small wildflower meadow. Today, in the midday drizzle, I picked our lunchtime salad of land cress, mustard greens, rocket, winter purslane from that same patch. We ate it with bread, also the product of roots in soil.

In other words, my action upon the garden labouring on its surface appearance was as nothing compared to the transforming effect of the roots under the surface, whose presence was entirely generative of new possibilities, that were in not insignificant ways attuned to the garden’s own being; but also represented important continuities with what had been in the garden in previous eras.

So, by all this, one of the things I am alluding to is the fact that in Wales these multiplicities of names and words and root meanings and their role in the landscape, in our lives, remains a generative fact. Few of the placenames around us will change much within our lifetimes, though many are likely to acquire new meanings and resonances one way or another. That process is, I think, much more interesting and creative than the superficially greater ‘creation’ in renaming a place entirely afresh.

This essay may then all amount to a long-winded explanation for why protests over the changes to cottage names and the collecting of old field names in, say, Ceredigion rests on an often poorly articulated intuition about the relationship between names and places that is in truth much more sophisticated and nuanced than a knee-jerk cultural conservatism. I support that assertion with my own anecdotal observations in many conversations with neighbours, friends and acquaintances here in Welsh-speaking rural Wales – that the vast majority would not object to a whole range of changes in the nomenclature of their places as long as they were in keeping with the linguistic texture of the place, as they understood that to be.

How, then, will a ‘man make known/ of what root he is grown’?

I am aware, in bringing all this to the surface, that any detailed discussion of roots can tend to feel akin to a plaidoyer for a traditionalist conservatism – which is not my intention here, though it was that of Tudur Aled in his cywydd from which my quotation was drawn.

What I am contending here, rather, is that roots’ inborn unwillingness to move, their very stubbornness in myriad ways – whether we consider them as biological entities or metaphorically as the origin and mental imprint of words – all tends, upon my reflection, towards humility. The very basic foundations of living entities, hidden from sight under layers of humus, are the things which enable both radical constancy and radical transformation. Much the same is true of words, not least as they live within an inhabited landscape.

These are not phenomena that I as a person, even if I were both genius and despot (and like most of us I am neither), could easily bring about. The efforts of the few individuals who have tried to imprint their own names on the landscape in this sort of way have, usually, quickly been undone. I think of Stalingrad, now once again Volgograd. Much the same is true of the efforts to erase roots’ biological effects in a landscape.

In that limited sense, then, I find myself compelled to yield to Tudur Aled’s insight, commonsensical in his own day; that the work of roots upon us is often far greater than we care to realize, or appreciate.

Carwyn Graves

Caerfyrddin, Ionawr 2025