A recent historical survey has discovered that most Welsh towns were given unpronounceable to keep English people away.
Places such as Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch and Ynysybwl were originally given their names so that invading kings would take one look at them on the map and decide that they couldn’t be arsed with it all.
Prof. Colin CleverClogs, who undertook the survey, told WalesOnCraic:
“We’ve been through all the evidence that we could find and it’s very clear that these particular Welsh towns were given names that would have had English people scratching their heads and sighing. We think that is why a lot of English kings couldn’t be arsed to invade them. By the time they’d given orders to invade a particular place, those Welsh chaps would have sneaked up behind him and chopped his legs off. These days of course, these Welsh towns use their long names to put tourists off coming, and worse still, to put rich English people who are looking to stuff their holiday caravans.
Photo © Henry Spooner (cc-by-sa/2.0)
