UKC

I'm having a discussion with someone about the name of Cloggy - Clogwyn du'r Arddu - which I believe it to mean the cliff of the black plough - Arddu being welsh for plough and the shape of the fault being a V. My opponent believes it to be something to do with King Arthur, and he said we were both wrong as he was talking to a local who seems to think it's 'cliff of black on black' which, depending on how you break the words up, could be correct - Ar ddu(black)?

So who is right?

In reply to higherclimbingwales:

Try and get hold of Enwau Eryri by Iwan Arfon Jones. He's done the etymology of most/all of Snowdonia mountain features. http://www.ylolfa.com/en/dangos.php?ISBN=0862433746

In reply to higherclimbingwales:

The first one sounds plausible, but the Welsh for plough is "aradr" to the best of my knowledge. But I'm from a south Wales farming background, it's possible they use a slightly different word in north Wales. I'd always assumed it was black on black

Arthur is Artur in Welsh, so although the English might sound similar to Arddu I don't think that one works.

In reply to higherclimbingwales:

I always thought it was "The Cliff of the Black Lake" - but I have no idea where that came from,

Chris

In reply to higherclimbingwales:

I've always heard it translated as 'The Black Cliff of the Black Height'

In reply to Chris Craggs:

Reading "The Black Cliff" there is this: "Then the Welsh came, and they gave the place a name: Arddu. The cliff they called Clogwyn du'r Arddu, the black cliff of the black height."

Clogwyn du = black cliff

The Welsh word "ar' translates as "on" so if you read "arddu" as "ar ddu" then that does translate as "on black". That does depend however on whether "arddu" is a contraction, a contraction with one or more letters having being dropped or a proper noun.

In reply to higherclimbingwales:


I believe you're far far more right than your mate and the 'local', but not quite a 100% correct.

'Arddu' as a word isn't a contraction and doesn't mean 'on black' in this context. It comes from the old Welsh word 'ardhu' which means the actual act of ploughing or tilling the ground rather than the instrument for doing so - i.e a plough. 'Ardhu' was recorded as being in use in the 1600s, but had apparently been supplanted by 'arddu' by the late 1700s. In modern Welsh, the word for 'to plough' is 'aredig' and 'arddu' has long fallen out of use as the language is a living one and is ever evolving.

So a correct translation of Clogwyn Du'r Arddu would be 'Black Cliff of the Ploughing' or possibly more logically 'Black Cliff of the Ploughed Ground' or perhaps even 'The Ploughed Ground's Black Cliff'.

Needless to say it sounds far nicer when said in Welsh!

HTH

Dave

PS 'Cloggy' is just plain awful IMHO ...

In reply to Dave Williams:


Like operatic arias, place names always sound more romantic if you don't understand the words. All those red hills, black hills, brown hills, etc...

'Arish Mell' in Dorset sounds nice. 'Prominence shaped like an arse'...

In reply to Dave Williams:



Thank you, that sounds like a pretty definitive answer to me!

In reply to Dave Williams:

Any idea why it might be called this? Doesn't seem like ground that would be ploughed up there!

mike

In reply to Dave Garnett:

The idea of the central V being plough shaped is just about plausible, but the 'the black cliff of the ploughing' much less so. What on earth has the landscape in the vicinity of Cloggy got to do with ploughing?

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

I can "see" the plough share in the shape of the crag base - eastern terrace area of the crag but I don't remember seeing any old style ploughing in the area - as far as I can tell the only signs of human usage are the old mine workings that you pass over when walking round to the crag, the initial part of the path is an old cart track as well.

Hafodty Newydd does of course mean "New summer house", now whether that's because it replaces another building on the same site or there was another in the area I don't know - there's a lot of abandoned farmsteads in the Snowdonia mountains. The name also hints of the old farming practice of moving the whole farm up and down the mountain with the seasons.

Often the naming of features in the landscape was very literal: Welsh and Gaelic are obvious in this respect when we translate the names, so calling the area after what is a fairly recognisable part of the cliff makes sense.

The risk here is of imposing our own interpretation to fit what we see rather than how it was seen back in the day.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


It's hard to come up with a literal translation that makes sense in English but the image of a the folded structure of the cliff being the result of a great ploughing makes complete sense to me (it's not plough-shaped). Maybe 'the black cliff of the furrow' works better?

In reply to Bob:


But if there's a word that means plough, somebody must have seen one used!

In reply to Bob:

Don't forget there are several places in the area called "Yr Arddu" (e.g. SW of Cnicht; S of Moel Siabod), so trying to interpret a single visual feature as looking like a plough or furrow is not necessarily appropriate.

Just to throw a spanner in the works - I'd always assumed that the noun "Yr Arddu" was a soft mutation form of a feminine noun "Garddu", so rather than being the verb 'to garden' (linked to the ploughing idea), could instead be the "Gar ddu", the "Black Shank" using shank (hock, thigh) as a term for a ridge structure similar to "Esgair" (which also means 'Shank', as well as ridge).

In reply to Dave Garnett:

Well yes and no. It might have been idle musing in the same way that people see shapes of familiar objects in clouds. They (the early settlers) don't necessarily have to have used a plough in the immediate area but would see either the shape of the Great Wall/Pinnacle area as an old style plough share or the furrows of the Western Buttress.

How features/areas get their names can be weird - on the family farm there's a field we called "Aerodrome" - it's a joke as the average angle of said field is about 30 degrees from the horizontal

In reply to Ron Rees Davies:

Just looked on the map at those two and they are both high ground/ridges so yes, a definite possibility. Y Geriadur Mawr doesn't have a translation for yr Arddu (well the online version doesn't, I haven't checked my paper copy)

In reply to higherclimbingwales:

A dark rise/hill on here: http://historypoints.org/index.php?page=porthmadog-cob-viewpoint

In reply to Bulls Crack:


I'm going to stick to this standard etymology until I see anything very convincing to the contrary. It seems most likely that, as with many names in Britain, both contraction and corruption of the original has taken place. A classic is Derby, alleged to mean 'deer clearing' because that's what the name sounded like to the Danes. When it has nothing to do with deer, and predates the Danes by at least a millennium.