Can anyone explain why Wales near Rother Valley is called Wales? No sheep jokes please!! ;-)

There's also Wales Bar, which is next to Wales. Not sure of the origin of the name though.

It's commonly supposed to be a place where the indigenous British remained when the Anglo-Saxons took over, but there must have been many such places that didn't get called Wales.

Wales meant 'foreign' or 'foreign people', which is a bit rich coming from invaders! So any local pockets called Wales would have been where the 'foreigners' (ie indiginous locals) lived.

The Comprehensive School in Kiveton Park is called Wales Comprehensive....and, another useless fact....

If you live in Wales

you have a Sheffield address
you live a mile from Derbyshire
you fall under Rotherham Council for rates
you have a Worksop telephone number

Yep the name recalls the history of the area. It was once part of the post-Roman Brythonic kingdom of Elmet, a Celtic area, and the name Wales betrays that history - as do names with the suffix Eccles-.

The language spoken by the Britons was a form of Welsh - that spoken by the folk in Rheged (North West England) was also known as Cymric or North Welsh - so 'Wales' and 'Welsh' seem to denote the Britons.

There's a pub in the village called the Lord Conyers. Who was he?

Useless information time.....


the Lords Conyers are descended from Sir John Conyers, who slew the Sockburn Worm, a dragon or flying serpent that devoured men, women and children in much of County Durham in 1063.


There you go! Big worms! very scary!:confused:

There is an interesting book by a local historian about the Lord Conyers, which I think is available in the library. There are many fascinating stories about the local aristocracy through the years, including about the once palatial Kiveton Hall.... I'm actually sat here putting together new pages about the Hall and its occupants for a website.

Re. the place names. There are interesting discussions to be had about the meanings of both Wales and nearby Kiveton, and the relative importance of each, with plenty of misconceptions floating around, although the comments in this thread are well founded.

There is an excellent MA dissertation about the history of Wales in Kiveton Library, a number of pamphlets published by local historians through the decades and an interesting work being published soon written by the late local historian Michael Sampson. All these will hopefully be available to download as PDFs from the website below by the end of the year (still in progress, bear with us!).

John T.

as do names with the suffix Eccles-.

Don't want to be picky or owt but that's a prefix.

We have an 'Intake' in Sheffield, and I've also seen it on old maps in various places around the country... that look like fields in some cases.

Does anyone know what Intake means, or what an intake is?

Thanks
Damkina

An 'intake' is usually a plot of land taken into cultivation from the 'waste' or uncultivated land - often on the edge 'common' land.