Talk:Menai Bridge

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Why can I not add the population to the box? The North Wales Police list it as 3850 but I cannot see how to add it to the box.

I have fixed the infobox and added the population figure - but the true figure should come from the last census records and not from an abritary figure used by North Wales Police. Velela 16:00, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Am I being naïve here or don't the Police take the value from the census (since that is how they work out how much to charge us all for their work)?

They may very well do, but I don't know that nor is there any verifiable reference to that. Public bodies may group or segregate communities based on their operational needs. Menai Bridge to the North Wales police might, for example, represent the area served by the Police House by the Church. Equally it might include the wider connurbation including Llanfair PG and Beaumaris - who knows ? - I certainly don't. At least with the census figures there is a consistent and verifiable source of data. (If I was at home I could have checked it by now !) Velela 18:49, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Etymology

Does anyone have any ideas about the etymology of Porthaethwy? I've always thought it was from porth (port) and aeth (pain/terror) which isn't a very welcoming name (for the first town on the island). (-wy means something though I cannot recall what—some kind of standard suffix I think.)

Also, although it may be somewhat self-explanatory, where and when does Menai Bridge come from (and which bridge is it referring to)?

There was nothing on Google BTW.

Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _{talk contrib} 16:29, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

I tried porth aethwy in Google on a random hunch and got somewhere. According to this page (and others) p. 693 of John Rhys's Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx (NY: Benjamin Blom, 1972) says that it "comes from a reduced form of Maethwy of Gilvaethwy and occurs in the Record of Carnarvon as Porthaytho". I've no idea who(?) Maethwy is.

Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _{talk contrib} 16:43, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Hiya Joe (again -- I seem to be following you around atm!). I have a book here called Enwau Tir a Gwlad by Melville Richards, which I think arises from a series of columns in the Cymro. One of the first names (on page 10) it mentions is Porthaethwy, in the context of names from tribes (which is what it says the -wy indicates). It says that the original name was Porth Ddaethwy, which changed to be Porth Aethwy (and then in the late nineteenth century when the council needed an area name for the health service and so on, it used the name Aethwy as a result). And it mentions Dindaethwy (the place - external link) not the person) as an example of the name surviving intact. Telsa (talk) 08:13, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Of course, I should have thought earlier of looking at the cy:Porthaethwy article, which also says it's from Porth and Daethwy. Ho hum... Telsa (talk) 08:20, 8 September 2006 (UTC)