Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

Capel y Fanhalog Gwynedd O. Pierce In her examination of the archaeological evidence for the pilgrimage route from the Cistercian abbey of Caerleon, or Llantarnam, to the shrine of Penrhys in the Rhondda (Morgannwg XL (1996), 10-32) Dr Madeleine Gray avers that the evidence of place-names had been 'of some help' as a source of information. There is included in the account, however, one instance of misinterpretation which should no longer be allowed to stand and which, in fairness to Dr Gray, is a perpetuation of an error of long-standing which appears in sources likely to have been relied upon in the compilation of her narrative. It concerns the area in which the farm of Mynachdy stands, near Ynysybwl in the parish of Llanwynno and which is considered likely to have been the approximate site of a grange of Llantarnam, situated at the end of the second stage of the route from another possible grange site at Pontymister on the Ebbw river in Gwent.' As is well known, this was the hub of an area which had been granted to Pendar, an abortive house of Margam Abbey, about the middle or the second half of the twelfth century but which had come into the possession of Llantarnam by the thirteenth century.2 The pilgrimage route ran across it from east to west and it is logical to deduce that here, or in close proximity, was the site of the grange. Even so, this is an assumption, based on the existence in the area of the farm-name Mynachdy, because there is insufficient early evidence otherwise to substantiate such a claim. The earliest forms of the name collected from available documentation date only from the sixteenth century Manachdy 1562, Manachdee 1626, Tire y Manachtee 1652, the Manachty 1656-7, 1669 etc. with Monachdy-barn 1756-7 listed in Griffith Jones of Llanddowror's Welch Piety as the location of one of his circulating schools and which could be the barn whose remains are mentioned by Dr Gray as being still in ruinous existence.3 Neither can the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales date the earliest structure on the site any earlier than the mid-seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries.4 The existence of the name Mynachdy (literally W mynach 'monk' + fy 'house, abode') remains, therefore, the most substantial basis for the assumption because in most cases of its occurrence as a farm-name in Wales (such names being quite numerous)5 and despite the dictionary definition of its meaning as