User:Trident13/Llansaint
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Llansaint
CISP No: SISHM Place: Llansaint Grid Ref: SN 3846 804 (GB) Parish: St Ishmael's (Llan Ishmael) Stones: 2 County: Carmarthenshire (Caerfyrddin) , Wales Saint(s): Ishmael ; Ishmael Site Type: ecclesiastical Site Notes
Evans/1907, 63: `Llansaint is a small village set on a hill, part of the ecclesiastical parish of Llan Ishmael, and its chapel...is held by the mother church and served by its minister'.
The site is near the mouth of the River Towy, and lies close to Carmarthen Bay[1]
[edit] Input
The dune barrier complexes between Pendine and Ginst Point and from Towyn Point to Pembrey continue to grow, especially towards the mouth of the Towy estuary and across Pembrey Old Harbour. The dating of these dunes is important, since perhaps an over, and uncritical, reliance on early histories (see, for example, Jones, 1977, p.9, quoting Curtis, 1880) has tended to push back their mature development into the prehistoric period, when a more recent origin can be argued. Unfortunately too much has been made of the supposed existence and loss of the village of ‘Hawton’. The confusion about Hawton can be laid squarely at the door of Christopher Saxton who depicted both Hawton and Llansaint in his maps2 (Fig. 1). Since subsequent mappers also did the same (Speed, 1610, Blaeu, c. 1645) it has been assumed that two separate villages, viz ‘Hawton’ and ‘Llansaint’ existed. This assumption was confounded by the fact that ‘Hawton’ was placed by the mappers to the seaward side of Llansaint, suggesting the loss of the former in some marine inundation, a notion that slotted in readily with legends of former settlements lost below the waves like Llys Helyg and Cantref y Gwaelod. A study of sixteenth and seventeenth century maps plainly shows that mappers often copied from editions produced by their forerunners, thus Speed, for example, names all the headlands and other coastal features of Carmarthenshire exactly as Saxton did 35 years before; Blaeu does much the same. They also, it appears, copied the blunder initiated by Saxton. W, H. Morris did much to rectify this faux pas in a comprehensive footnote (Morris, 1975) when he stated that Hawton (alias Halkenchurch) Originally published in Heather James (ed) Sir Gar: Studies in Carmarthenshire History 1991, pp 143-166 3 could be proved ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to be identified with Llansaint. The name, he showed, is derived from Old English Helgena, genitive plural of halga saint and circe church (Charles, 1938b). Thus Llansaint and Hawton are the same place, and both names coexisted until the Welsh rendering became dominant. Unfortunately the myth has still to be firmly and finally laid to rest (vide Davis, 1989, 28). That some form of settlement lost by sand inundation formerly existed near St. Ishmael’s[2]
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/cisp/database/site/sishm.html
- ^ http://www.terra-demetarum.org.uk/Articles/where%20sea%20meets%20land.pdf
