Esker, Esgair, What's in a Name?

Just recently, I think I have experienced my own very specific example of the astonishing ability to miss noticing a hill in the landscape and wishing I had thought more carefully about its name to start with. It concerns a particular type of hill known to geologists as an ‘esker’ and really had I paid more attention to things, I might have noticed that I had been frequently sitting on the missing hill the whole time.

Ever since we first looked at the old farmhouse where we now live, I have had a minor puzzle recurring sporadically to me, about its name: “Pant-yr-Esgair”.

Fortunately, thanks to the tenacity of the Welsh for having, against the odds, kept their ancestral language alive, Welsh names should, in theory, be quite easy to unravel. For the Welsh speakers (though I try, I am a long way off being one of these), a local place name meaning such as this will usually be instantly obvious. For them, the countryside names originate from the same language they still speak, and though some little corruptions will no doubt have crept in, the names will often be instantly transparent, redolent in local topographical meaning.

Even for those of us who aren’t yet Welsh speakers, simply opening a Welsh- English dictionary can go a fair way to interpreting the meaning of a name like this. So “Pant-yr-Esgair”, from my understanding, seems to roughly translate as ‘hollow of the ridge’. I looked this up after our first visit here. As the house stands in lower lying ground, framed behind to the north by a fairly significant typical local hill ridge, I quite happily ticked off my understanding of the name as referring to the house’s placement below this ridge.

Now I’m not so sure. I’ve lived here a while and studied the land a little more, and with my enduring fascination for landscape have studied the local maps and looked up the meaning of many more a Welsh name on them.

Welsh is a strangely descriptive, poetic language, and its words sometimes have poetically ambiguous meanings. Conversely, the sympathies of those that walked and worked these lands a long time ago towards its subtleties of contour, hill shapes and types were, I am convinced, much greater than ours, which incline them to a precision of meaning that we would not necessarily understand the implications of today.

Realising I may have jumped slightly hastily to a conclusion about how the house name was derived from its surroundings, I couldn’t help but return to the subject and study it a little more carefully.

Looking at the ‘Pant’ element (and I am aware I am way out on a limb here with a language whose subtleties I have no grasp), it seems that translations of it could encompass meanings along the varied lines of valley, dip, dent, reduction or hollow.

The ‘Esgair’ term too throws up an even greater puzzle. When I first mentioned my translation of the name to my brother-in-law, who studied geology, I pointed out the similarity of the word to the English word I dimly recalled, ‘esker’. I happily anticipated that he would thus concur with my conclusion of the meaning, as referring to the large ridge behind the house. But he didn’t. In his gentle way, he said that his understanding of an esker was more of a long, low ‘spit’ type formation of loose stones (if I remember correctly). He also said that it would probably be a glacial deposit, fairly low in form too. So, nothing like the rather tall, hard, and very solid stone based hill formation behind the house. Thus, the seeds of doubt were sown.

Every reference to the English word esker I can find seems to imply something along the lines he suggested:

“A long, narrow, raised line of earth, small stones and sand left on the earth’s surface where melted ice once flowed under a glacier”
-Cambridge English Dictionary

I returned to the Welsh word, ‘esgair’. It seemed abundantly clear that the language has many words for ridge type formations: crib, cefn, trum to name a few. Each, I suspected, had their own fairly specific topographical meaning. Searching on the web, I found a forum where a welsh speaker had disambiguated the different welsh ridge terms:

“Esgair is what is called in English “esker”, that is, a ridge of gravel and sediment which is deposited by a glacier”

All this pointed back to a low, stony, gravelly bank formation (i.e. not a large lump of rock!) as the basis for this word.

It seemed now that the name must have originated in more subtle landscape features than I had supposed. More than once I have sat out on the lawn, on our clay land behind the house and looked out across the view wondering where this missing ‘esker’ type bank of stones could be. I couldn’t see anything that fitted this description, so I started to try and think of other ways of approaching the problem.

I wondered what other features our ancestors were seeing in the surrounding landscape when they picked out this name, “Pant yr Esgair”? Maybe I could find a clue in that. It is perhaps hard to see the landscape as they saw it, even though in many ways I suspect it is little changed.

Possibly there were clues to be had in some of the other nearby names. The next two farms along are called ‘Rhos Lwyd’ and ‘Llwyn Celyn’ (which I roughly translate as ‘grey plain’ and ‘holly bush’ respectively). Both names suggest to me a more open feel to the landscape than I experience today. There is definitely a ‘plain’ like sense to the area described, but the heavy tree cover from the hedges disguises this now. And a grey plain? Green is the predominant colour now - all the fields are grass, but there is little doubt that these were once reasonable ploughlands. An extract about the land around here on the Talley website describes it thus...

“The soil is grey in colour and tolerably deep and fertile; the chief agricultural produce is wheat, barley and oats, with a good and sufficient supply of grass and hay for the use of the dairies”
-A Topographical Dictionary of Wales 1849 quoted in an article by Roger Pike entitled ‘About Talley’ on the Talley Parish Website

I can easily see how the clay here would show up greyish when ploughed, so immediately I can picture more open views across the flattish and slightly rising open ground of the ‘grey plain’, interspersed with small managed hedgerows and dotted with a few trees.

Within this context, the Llwyn Celyn (holly bush) name seems to make more sense as an identifier. In the more tree covered landscape of today, a holly bush would make a poor marker, but amongst ploughland in a more open space, especially in winter, a prominent holly bush would be a significant feature. Such bushes were after all known to have been planted at regular intervals in later hedges to assist ploughmen in having something to aim at when marking out fields for ploughing, as they were easily picked out from the far end of a field. All this, but still no sign of an esker anywhere!

Perhaps I needed to think more about where people were coming from when the house acquired this description. Maybe this could give a better context to understand why this particular set of words were the most relevant to describe the location, way back in time. The most obvious start point seemed to be the main road that runs through the valley. It is at least a few hundred years old as a main route and I suspect it is much older still.

This main road running up from Llandeilo to Talley has always puzzled me slightly, in relation to our house. It runs on a pretty straight, determined Northerly course for over two miles (even before the relatively recent re-alignments to straighten it further), with just a slight curve that seems to allow for crossing the river. Strangely though, about 400 yards south of our house, the road swerves sharply to the left for a few hundred yards and then sharply back right again for another few hundred, bringing it pretty much back onto its original alignment. From there on, it continues in sweeping curves which more or less follow the contour of the valley.

It is an anomalous pair of bends; they allow me to find our house straight away on a map at a glance. This strange kink appears to be deliberately swerving around something. Our house and land would never, I think, have been of sufficient status to justify a detour around it, in the way which some roads curve around a manor house, but there is little else here to steer around ... Except, there is a slight, low, broad ridge across the fields in front of our house, but in the context of all the other ups and downs of this road, it seems hardly worthy of attention.

Perhaps this last bit of hill climb though, being up out of the valley, on our sticky clay, was just a bit too much all in one go. Easier to take a loaded horse and cart around for the last bit. Perhaps, even once, this ridge was a more prominent, sharper feature. Either way, I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to it. Its shape is not terribly noticeable in the current landscape.

It was only recently when clearing brambles from the area behind the house, about sixty yards away from it, that looking around I realised that this subtle slope, continuing behind the house, amounted to enough of a ridge at this point to put me on a level with our chimney top. On one side of me, the ground sloped gently down in a round, smooth, almost imperceptible spur, gently melting into the plateau just before the road; on the other side, our house was nestled into a slight declivity in the ground, caused by the stream that runs past it.

I suddenly realised that this might be my missing esgair. I should have noticed it really, I had obviously found the slight elevation subconsciously before, as the chair which marks my favourite spot to sit in, in the garden (on account of the view it has down the valley), is on the crest of this slight ridge ... The same chair in which I have sat and pondered the problem of the missing esker on a number of occasions!

And although the house is hardly in a hollow, there is a most definite ‘dent’ or ‘dip’ in this ridge that it is seated in. The dip has a small stream running through it (I don’t know if the dip caused the stream, or if the water runs this way because of the dip).

Perhaps if I had thought carefully about the stream, I may have spotted another clue there. Although our land is mainly clay, the base of the stream is made up entirely of a loose scree of stones, gravel and sediment. Not just a few small stones washed down by the stream, but enough and plenty of a size to suggest that if one cut through the clay top layer of our land it might well be underlain by a whole great bank of loose stones, ranging from small silty bits through gravel to proper stony pieces. Just like the definition of an ‘esgair’ / ‘esker’ in fact.

I think once upon a time these subtle landforms might have been even more apparent from the road, only the view is obscured by trees these days. It seems easy now though, on reflection, to see how a traveller climbing the gradient up the valley on the road, would clearly have noticed the form of the ‘esgair’. Then, having deliberately detoured around it, would have seen our house (or its predecessor) snugged into the back of this low ridge and nestled in a slight dip with the stream as he or she did so. How gloriously and subtly descriptive!

I may be wrong of course.

I was pretty convinced that my original explanation for the house name was right originally. Perhaps in time I’ll notice something else that will confound my theory. I won’t mind though, because the real pleasure is the journey of imagination and wonderment into the past and the call to pay attention. Attention to the subtleties of the intimate details of a local landscape and its associated language, and explore meanings that I would otherwise so easily miss.