What's in a name?

A couple of weeks ago, to escape from the early darkness that descends upon our little village at this time of year, we went for a walk through the woodland behind our house, and up onto the track that leads to the broad, flat, sunny whaleback of the Garth.
As you climb the path, both a geography and a history lesson unfold before your eyes.

The valley floors are overcrowded; roads, railways, the old canals thread and interwine south to north and they are lapped by untidy waves of houses and trading estates. This is a legacy of the century before last, when coal and iron were mined and extracted from the valleys, and settlements grew up around the works and the collieries to house and supply the immigrant workers. For the populations in those valley towns were, and are, cosmopolitan; in the valley where I grew up, family names included Hartshorn, Courtney, Greening, Walbeoff, Szymanski, and Minoli, as well as Evans, Gronw and Morgan. Before the nineteenth century, the deep-cut, damp, valleys were hardly populated at all.

The dissected plateaux rolling high above are a different story. This is farmland and moorland, and here, settlements, though fewer and smaller than down below, have a pedigree. There are farms, typically they are old farms, whose byres were old even before the acts of union. Blood-lines are older up here; there are Vaughans and Lewises, Pritchards and Prices. Coughlins, Joneses and Contis, if they have found their way up to the sunlight at all, have done so only recently, and by way of the high-altitude council estates that were the successors to the earlier TB hospitals (situated alike,  to clear the diseased lungs of the poorer working folk) or the newer dormitory villages and terracotta-roofed houses that sprang up in the affluent years of the beginning of the present century.

Up on the Garth, then, it should have been no surprise to see the local hunt, the Pentyrch, gathered on the sky-line with its horses and hounds. Behind them, beyond the farms of the Vale of Glamorgan, and across the Severn Channel, was Exmoor, and in front, to the North, the high moorland of the Brecon Beacons. Atop their impressive horses, and dressed in jackets of black or brown velvet, the riders and followers are probably a more substantial link to the long-view of the history of this landscape than the damp, patchwork citizenry in the stone streets below. Even they are not immune from infiltration, though, because, as we passed, their whipper-in, after sounding the horn, and shouting: "Get down Dancer!" at one over-eager dog, called to us, "Oi, you 'aven' seen three dogs down by there 'ave you? We carn' find 'em."