Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
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Having just a couple of months ago burrowed my way into the center of one of the world's most famous Neolithic barrows, more specifically a passage tomb at Newgrange (ca. 3200 BC, older than Stonehenge, which I had visited the previous week, and the Egyptian pyramids, which I have yet to behold in person) in County Meath, Ireland with J. P. Mallory, Indo-European archeolinguist and author of In Search of the Irish Dreamtime: Archaeology and Early Irish Literature (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016), all 6'7" of him and 6'2" of me, making it a difficult crawl / squeeze for the two of us, I was keen to read this article:
To Historians and Tourists, It’s a Mysterious Ancient Burial Site. It Used to Be My Playground.
Author Oliver Smith spent many childhood days exploring a prehistoric mound near his grandparents’ house in Wales. As an adult, he found himself irresistibly drawn back to it—and other sites like it.
By Oliver Smith. WSJ (Feb. 12, 2025)
I spent many childhood holidays with my grandparents, in a pebble-dashed house in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch*, North Wales. The village has the second-longest place name in the world (losing out to a hill in New Zealand**), and one can often find tourists at the train station, posing for photos next to the station sign, which is almost as long as the trains that stop there.
Fewer visitors make their way to a curious mound a few fields southwest of the village, not far from a narrow sea strait: a place which once served as a kind of childhood playground for me.
The mound had a grassy slope you could roll down until you felt nauseous. A gloomy tunnel mouth, lined with slabs, revealed nooks where you could hide from parents or grandparents who were insisting it was time to come home. If you dared proceed farther down the tunnel, you saw the mound was hollow: inside was a small, damp chamber, filled with spider webs, crooked stones and other prompts for childhood nightmares. To a 6-year-old, it seemed like a human-sized version of a badger’s den.
Absorbed as I was then in childhood make-believe, I was uncertain what the mound really was and who built it. But I knew it was old—possibly even older, I thought incredulously, than my grandparents and the antique furniture that filled their house.
I paid another visit to this little hillock a few months ago, late one fall afternoon. A cold wind blew off the strait, shaking the last leaves from the trees. A muddy path led to an information board—installed since my early visits—which explained that this was Bryn Celli Ddu (meaning “the hill of the dark grove”), a 5,000-year-old tomb.
It’s one of the best preserved of the Neolithic “long barrows” that line Europe’s Atlantic coast, cited as the world’s oldest widespread tradition of stone architecture. Archaeologists have found human bones inside, along with arrowheads, mussel shells and other flotsam of prehistoric lives. The mound is a relic of an age when humans chose to settle down and farm the land, a place connected with the invention of “home.” For me, the mound and its surrounds represent home on a personal level. My mother has traced her family tree back to villages nearby, where the trail runs cold.
Over the past few years I have been drawn to places like this. I have stomped across farmland and moorlands, in England, Ireland and France, to visit standing stones, henges and other prehistoric sites. In bookstores, I have sought out British Ordnance Survey maps, on which such remains are marked in a deliciously sinister Gothic script. The places I’ve visited have origins that straddle many millennia, but they typically share a few common features. A half-legible information board. A silence interrupted by the creak of an iron gate, or the chug of a distant tractor.
I have also lured my young family, on various pretexts, to ancient sites. One summer afternoon, at the Nympsfield Long Barrow in southern England, my 3-year-old son injured himself climbing a stone structure. Later, at the hospital, one nurse pressed ice on a ping-pong ball-sized bump on his forehead. Another wrote “Neolithic Megalith” on the paperwork describing the injury.
There’s a reason I keep returning. Prehistoric sites, by definition, date from a time before written history. Bryn Celli Ddu, Nympsfield and others were almost certainly sacred places—and yet they come with no scripture, insist on no ritual. They accommodate pilgrims like me who struggle with the rigidities of organized faith, but suspect answers can be discerned in the soil and stone. Indeed, they make no demands of their congregation of dog walkers and picnickers. Only that your imagination fills the blanks that archaeology cannot, and animates the scene with the ghosts of the pious, present here long ago. The quietness of these places can be kindling for spells of deep thought.
*Translates into English as "St. Mary's Church in the hollow of white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio near the red cave". The 58 characters include 7 digraphs, so it consists of only 51 letters in the Welsh language. (source)
**TaumatawhakatangihangakoauauoTamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu located 6kms outside of a small village called Porangahau, Central Hawkes Bay, Aotearoa/New Zealand. (official website) Maori name that translates into English as "The summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his nose flute to his loved one". (source)
Selected readings
- "Eyjafjallajökull fail" (4/16/10)
- "Another jökull heard from?" (6/13/10)
- "Eyjafjallajökull FTW" (4/27/10)
- "Jökull of the year" (5/22/11)
- "Long words" (6/25/18)
[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]
katarina said,
February 15, 2025 @ 12:52 pm
Echoing the length of the winding Welsh place-name, that is also a long, winding, one-paragraph opening sentence.
Victor Mair said,
February 15, 2025 @ 2:02 pm
You are amazing, katarina! I was hoping someone would notice that.
katarina said,
February 15, 2025 @ 3:09 pm
Well, I noticed you entered into the spirit of the winding Welsh place-name.
Kate Bunting said,
February 17, 2025 @ 5:07 am
The full version of the name is thought to have been invented as a publicity stunt – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llanfairpwllgwyngyll#Placename_and_toponymy
S Frankel said,
February 18, 2025 @ 9:16 am
Could someone who knows more about Welsh grammar than I do, which should be a lot of people, please explain why Llanfair… has the expected soft mutation (lenition) (< Llan + Mair) but …llantysilio… doesn't ?
Why isn't it …landysilio..?
HS said,
February 28, 2025 @ 8:56 pm
"Taumata….[several dozen letters omitted but I actually know it by heart]…..kitanatahu" ("the hill where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the slider, climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his flute to his loved one" is very well known here in New Zealand as being "the world's longest placename", but I am actually extremely skeptical as to whether it can be considered a "name" at all in the normal sense of the term. As far as I can see it's simply a long descriptive phrase, and the fact that you take a long descriptive phrase and run the words together on the page without spaces doesn't make it a "name".
Obviously real names can be more than one word – New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Palmerston North, Buenos Aires, Cape of Good Hope, etc, etc, etc – but it seems to me that the essential thing about a "name" is that you psychologically grasp it as a single unified whole and essentially forget about the internal structure and the individual component words, and I defy anybody to say that they can do that with this novella about Tamatea and his flute. To be able to grasp a multi-word name as a single psychological whole, and thus regard it as a real "name", probably requires at least three conditions – (1) it is relatively short, probably no more than half a dozen words or so (ignoring obvious difficulties as to what constitutes a "word", and whether you can make such comparisons across different languages and different types of language), (2) it has simple "flat" internal structure or grammar, without embedded clauses or relative clauses, and (3) it exists in a single invariant form. You can probably find counter-examples to all three of these conditions individually, but there can't be many if any real names that break all of these conditions simultaneously like "Taumata…..kitanatahu" does. Many Maori placenames are quite long and have internal structure, often using suffixes like "nui" meaning "big" or "roa" meaning "long", e.g. Maunganui = Big Hill, or Wainuiomata = Big Waters of Mata, but around 12 or 15 letters is the normal limit in terms of length. "Taumata….kitanatahu" is around 5 or 6 times longer than any other Maori placename that I'm aware of.
"Taumata…..kitanatahu" is officially recognized by the New Zealand Geographic Board as a placename and appears on official maps, so in a strict legal sense it is unquestionably a "placename", but the cynic in me can't help wondering whether the reason it is officially accepted as a placename is simply so that we can claim the title of having the world's longest placename. It is a national characteristic of New Zealand that we like to claim that we have the largest, highest, tallest, shortest, smallest, longest, oldest, newest, oddest, fastest, slowest, of just about anything you can think of in the world, and if we can't claim it for the whole world we tend to claim it for the "Southern Hemisphere". (The "Southern Hemisphere" is a particularly useful concept here because most of it is made up of ocean, and the small percentage that isn't ocean is mainly desert, jungle, rain forest, pampas, outback, or Antarctic icecap.)
If "Taumata……kitanatahu" is considered a genuine placename then there seems to me to be no real limit to what can be considered a placename and it is trivially easy to come up with longer examples. e.g. "The place on the highway where our old green Holden station wagon broke down when we were driving up to Auckland to visit our cousins back in January 1973 and dad had to hitchhike into the next town to find a mechanic while mum sat reading a book under a tree by the side of the road and my brother and I went and played in a nearby stream." Bingo! 269 letters! The world's longest placename!
The locals refer to Taumata……kitanatahu" simply as "Taumata Hill", and since in my view the real name of a place is the name that the locals call it by, as far as I'm concerned that is its real name.