Coastal Maps of an Empty Wales?

Empty. That’s probably one unkind, unthinking way of describing Wales at the time of the coastal maps drawn by Lewis Morris and later his son, William Morris, in the mid 18th century.

Of course, a coastal map of Wales is that, a map of the coast. It was there to help navigate the coast which was the quickest way of traveling and avoiding the brigands and muddy tracks inland. But to a modern eye the coast looks positively empty.

The maps start from the north east, follow Anglesey‘s treacherous coastline and goes south.  Caernarfon a walled town, Pwllheli a couple of streets, Llandudno a couple of houses, Swansea a small market town. Aberystwyth is seen to have grown in the intervening years between Lewis Morris and Williams Morris’s map … or maybe, it’s just better drawn.

One sees how the landscape has changed. As an Aberystwyth resident, the fantastically-called Bryn Diodde (misery/pain hill) on the seafront seems to have been obliterated since it was included in both maps.

There are towns which simply aren’t on the map at all.

Rhyl – not even a glint in the tourists eye. Not even mentioned below Rhuddlan or St Asaph.

Abaeraeron, the beautiful Regency town barely appears on William’s map having only been built in its modern form in 1807.

Port Talbot, like a Welsh Tel Aviv, is yet to rise on the empty sand dunes.

It’s a lost age – a Wales of half a million people not 3 million. A slow, pastorial Wales. Outside the market towns and south Pembrokeshire, a solidly Welsh-speaking Wales.  For a sense of the space between settlements and low density of population, one would need today to travel to the Balkans.

But not a quiet Wales, either. A Wales of religious revivals, of rowdy market fairs and dancing, of blind harpist plying their trade in pubs. A Wales of Tribannau Morgannwg sung to drive the ox to plough, of the Fari Lwyd and sports like Cnapan and Bando played on those ‘empty spaces’.

A lost Wales -  with the lost sound of Welsh bagpipes played at weddings and lost Welsh accents like the Gwenhwyseg with it’s ‘a denau’ (thin ‘a’) similar to the ‘a’ pronounced in Montgomeryshire Welsh today). An ‘a’ which sounds closer to an ‘e’ … some would say today’s hard ‘a’ in the Cardiffians ‘Kairdiff‘.

The maps of the Lewisiaid Môn (the Lewis’s of Anglesey) aren’t complete but they’re a small off shore view of a country which was hardly mapped then and of a time not fully appreciated today.

Siôn Jobbins