Tirlun: The new Welsh speaker inspiring others with extraordinary insights into Welsh place names

Stephen Price

A new Welsh speaker from north Wales is captivating people across the world with his incredible insights into Welsh place names.

After moving to China in his late teens, Josef Roberts from Colwyn Bay found people would often ask him two questions that would sow the seeds for his ever-growing passion: “Where are you from?” and “Do you speak Welsh?”

Josef grew up in a non-Welsh speaking family, and went on to spend half of his 20s in China speaking Mandarin, and his return to Wales saw him learn Welsh and work at Bangor University.

Josef recently launched the Tirlun channel, with Tirlun, meaning landscape in Welsh – Tir meaning ‘land’ and Llun meaning image, while together they mean a representation or mental conception of a landscape.

He loves languages, place names and walking around outside – and his aim is to earn a living doing what he loves.

Place names in Wales and the rest of the world are something Josef says are closely tied in to our identities. And with them so much of our language, history, culture, and how we see the world. Josef’s channel aims to unpack all of these elements in a fun and accessible way.

Josef is very busy with the page, and aims to have a new Facebook, Instagam, TikTok and YouTube post every day.

His aim is to cover the small places and the big, with everywhere home or a special place for at least some, and to cover every place name in Wales. He also plans to extend his passion to places outside Wales – including Cornwall, Brittany, Ireland, The Isle of Man, the Netherlands, Greece.. his love for languages and place names knows no bounds.

Josef says it’s important for him to go on foot, or sometimes the bus, to feel a closer connection to the land which the car won’t allow.

We at Nation.Cymru have been following his channels for some time now, so a quick chat was inevitable.

You weren’t raise in a Welsh-speaking family, what made you decide to learn?

I was born and raised in Wales, and so in some sense have always been surrounded by the language, even if I didn’t learn it well in school or get much opportunity to use it outside of school.

After moving to China at 17 and learning to speak Chinese, I would keep being asked by people if I spoke Welsh, and that combined with a growing sense of hiraeth and interest in the culture and history of the land I call home pushed me towards it pretty hard.

I returned to Wales about five years ago to learn Welsh and try to establish myself properly here. In the process, I moved to Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll and Llangefni for a while and did an MBA at Bangor University at that time.

I’m hoping that Tirlun will help connect people who don’t speak Welsh in Wales and beyond more deeply to the place names around them and maybe even encourage others to learn a bit more Welsh.

At the very least, I believe if people understand the stories, history, and meaning behind our place names, then maybe they will be more inclined to support protecting and promoting them as part of our national heritage, and I will have done something to help preserve Welsh place names.

What methods do you use to learn?

I have my own method that I’ve used to learn a few languages to different levels. I tried to make a business around it after graduating but it didn’t work out.

It essentially involves frequency lists for vocabulary, comparison to languages you already know for grammar and a lot of listening and just talking to people when you can, even if you aren’t sure if you’re speaking correctly.

I used that, and I was fairly able to express myself in Welsh about 3 years in, but now I’m about 7 years in and a lot more fluent, but I still stumble on people’s accents and complicated vocabulary sometimes.

You’ve got an infectious passion for place names, tell us more about this interest?

I love place names because they combine several interesting things like languages, history, culture and geography into one parcel.

I’m also fascinated by how much of our identity is tied into place names – when we meet new people, after telling them our name, we usually tell them the name of the place we are from, and through that so much of our linguistic background, culture, thoughts and opinions can be conveyed.

It’s an interesting topic to break down and explore.

Tell us a few of your favourite place names and why they’re so fascinating

Every place name has something interesting about it, if you dig deep enough. Here are a few of my recent favourites though:

Deva / Caer (y llion mawr) / Chester

The various names for Chester are a fascinating topic because they exemplify how fluid borders are through history, how a place near a border between two languages and cultures can accrue names, and through them we can understand some of the history of a place.

Despite common misconception, the earliest name for the area is not Latin, but Brythonic, the ancestor language to Welsh (as well as Cornish and Breton).

Its name was something like dewa and was likely the name of the goddess of the River Dee (it’s the root of the name still, the Welsh form for it, Dyfrdwy, is made of dyfr which is an old form of dŵr, meaning ‘water’, and dwy which is the name of the goddess, so ‘Waters of the Goddess’. This name was then borrowed into Latin as Deva, from which we get the name of the Roman settlement.

During this time, another Brythonic/ Welsh name for the settlement arose, Caer y Llion Mawr, literally ‘the great fortress of the legion’, describing the Roman garrison there.

Over time this name has shortened to simply Caer meaning ‘fortress’, and caer being the original term for a fortress, related to cau which means a field now, but just meant an enclosed area originally.

The English name for Chester comes from an old borrowing of a different Latin term, castra meaning ‘camp’. They borrowed it as Ċeaster into Old English, which evolved into modern ‘Chester’.

Prestatyn

Prestatyn is a great name because it’s a great example of when one language preserves the older form of another like a fossil.

To understand the name, we have to understand the history a little. In the early Middle Ages, this area was taken from the kingdom of Gwynedd and settled partially by Old English-speaking settlers from the neighbouring kingdom of Mercia. This led to many towns in this area originally being named in Old English.

Here it is preserving Old English’s original pronunciation, as the original name of the town was prēostatūn in Old English, made of prēosta, the genitive plural form of prēost, which means ‘priest’ and tūn, which means ‘homestead’, and thus means ‘the homestead of the priests’.

When the area was retaken from Mercia by Gwynedd, the name was written in Welsh as Prestatyn, and because Welsh is somewhat more phonetic than English, it kept that pronunciation. There was another prēostatūn in England, but following nearly a thousand years of evolution it has now evolved into Preston, in Lancashire!

Another good example of this is Niwbwrch, or Newborough in Anglesey.

In Middle English, which was the language of the people settled there following the conquest, the town was something like newe borough, with the gh at the end of borough being pronounced somewhat like the Welsh ch. The Welsh wrote this name as they heard it at the time as Niwbwrch, preserving that original pronunciation.

Penrhos Garnedd

The name for Penrhos Garnedd is fascinating because it shows how much history can be locked into a place name.

The first element is penrhos, made of pen meaning ‘head’, but figuratively coming to mean the top of something, and rhos meaning a ‘moor’ or ‘heath’, but garnedd is a ‘cairn’ or ‘mound’ or even ‘barrow’, so it means something like ‘the top moor of the cairn’ or ‘the heath of the barrow’, and for a long time it confused me because Penrhos Garnedd is mostly a flat housing estate by a hospital, but exciting after some research I found out that one of the grassy mounds in the housing estate is, in fact, a Bronze age burial mound that gave the name to the area!

Caerfyrddin

This is a good example of something called ‘folk etymology’. Sometimes, when a place name doesn’t make much sense in a language, people create stories around them to revitalise them with meaning. They are often fantastical, or related to some great historical deed, but don’t reflect the original meaning, and Caerfyrddin, Carmarthen, is a good example of this.

Many people will say that the name comes from caer, ‘fortress’ and fyrddin, a soft mutation of myrddin, so the fortress of Merlin from Arthurian legend, but that doesn’t quite line up with the Latin sources, which if Merlin was a historical figure, would predate him.

The name comes from caer, meaning ‘fortress’, and Latin Moridūnum, the name the Romans had for the town. This name was itself borrowed from the Brythonic name for it, which was *Mori-dūnom, *Mori meaning ‘sea’ (ancestor to Modern Welsh môr) and dunom, also meaning ‘fortress’ or ‘stronghold’, and is related to the din in dinas (city).

Landerneau

This one is somewhat recent, but when researching for a potential set of videos in Brittany, I discovered that Landerneau is just the Breton form of Llandyrnog (Denbighshire), same saint and everything.

We touched on it at the outset, but what made you choose Tirlun as your channel’s name?

I chose the name Tirlun for a few reasons. Firstly, I wanted to use a Welsh name because I believe in representing our language.

I decided on Tirlun because I like the implications of the word.

The general Welsh word for landscape is tirwedd, a mix of tir meaning ‘land’, and wedd which is a soft mutation of gwedd, which is the outside edge of something, and conveys a very physical meaning of the word for landscape, literally the shape of the land.

Tirlun however is made of tir, meaning ‘land’ again, and lun, soft mutation of llun, meaning ‘image’ or ‘picture’. This word has more of a connotation of the image one has of a landscape in your head, or a representation of a landscape, which is a lot more fitting to what I’m trying to do.

I’m trying to break apart and look at how we interact with the landscape around us through place names.

And what’s next for you?

I’ve set myself the rather lofty goal of making a video explaining every place name in Wales. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I aim to do every hill over a certain height, mountain, river and settlement over a certain size, so I am focussing on that most of the time. It may take me a few years.

I’m hoping to make some expeditions abroad to talk about place names outside Wales as well – Cornwall, Brittany, Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man and England are high up on the list, but also maybe further afield like Japan (I’d love to do videos on the Shikoku 88 Temples Pilgrimage) or Maori place names along Te Ara Roa in Aotearoa (New Zealand). Anywhere there’s a place with a name really!

I’m looking to begin a series of small e-books based on the place names of each cantref in Wales. The first one is the cantref of Rhos in north Wales, my home cantref, and that should be out in the next couple of weeks.

I’ve been talking about doing some work on TV and collaborations with other people on social media, businesses and organisations, but I can’t say much about it right now.

Diolch Josef – we can’t wait to see where you end up next!

Josef’s daily posts are a joy, and will no doubt inspire others to learn the language and more about the world around them.

If you’d like to follow him on his journey, follow him on his website, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube

He also has a Patreon, where people can support him on his quest, as well as get some supporter-only extras.