The area of West Wales where I live is quite fascinating, not only from both history and geology viewpoints. It’s also a bit of a linguistic melting plot where the English and Welsh languages now live side by side, and occasionally clash, usually in a good-natured and humorous way. Throw in French and Flemish speaking past inhabitants of the area and even Norse speakers if we go back further in time and one can spend many hours studying place names and origins. For example the port of Fishguard in North Pembrokeshire derives it’s modern English name directly from the Norse name of Fiskigarðr which roughly translated means “fish catching enclosure”. In Welsh the town is known as Abergwaun, meaning “Mouth of the River Gwaun”.

A number of the villages around me get their names from the castles that were built to try and control what was once a rather wild and violent border between the Norman and Flemish inhabited southern areas and the Welsh speaking area to the north of what became known as the Landsker (an old Norse name for border).

As for the pingos, well they were formed during the last glacial period 12,500 years ago. Pingos can only form in a permafrost environment when underground streams freeze and expand upwards forming a mound of earth-covered ice. As the ice melts the soil layer drops creating a crater resembling a volcano. A small freshwater pond can fill the crater which formed from the ice melting. The name pingo comes from an Inuit word for a small hill. There are some examples of collapsed pingos very close to where I live.

Visitors to the area invariably go away wanting to come back as soon as possible, so it was no surprise to find a nice blog article on the area here.

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