Every place-name is telling you something.
There’s a story behind every sign. Explore the coast, the castles, the saints — and one wizard who may have borrowed his name from a town. Click a place, uncover its roots and learn to read the landscape.
mapped
Aberystwyth
The mouth of the River Ystwyth
Select a piece above. The name starts to make sense.
The familiar aber is your first clue. It tells you this name is connected to water. Even if you’ve never been to Aberystwyth, you’ve already decoded half of it.
Explore the source ↗ (opens in a new tab)Real geographic data, not an invented mapHow we plotted the places + sources
Wales's outline comes from the ONS country/region dataset and is cartographically generalised. Every dot uses an Ordnance Survey Open Names settlement-centre coordinate, including the six new places. The same Web Mercator projection places the boundary and markers. Dots represent settlement centres, not precise town boundaries. The Wales coastline remains source geometry, not a hand-drawn illustration.
Town-centre positions: OS Open Names, Open Government Licence v3.0 · Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right. Place-name explanations distinguish established origins from legend and folk etymology; individual sources are linked in each field note.
Meet the repeat offenders.
Learn a handful of Welsh words and suddenly road signs start making sense. Tap a root to spotlight the names that contain it — then choose one to explore.
Can you crack the code?
Six quick questions about rivers, saints, forts and one famously disputed wizard.
Get one wrong? You'll learn why before moving on.
You spot ABER on a sign. What geographical feature might be nearby?
You’ve just learned more Welsh than you expected.
Imagine what you could do in ten minutes a day.