BURY WALLS, SHROPSHIRE, IDENTIFIED AS THE ANCIENT WELSH PENGWERN

A Rampart of Bury Walls Hillfort, Shropshire

It has become rather customary to identify the ancient site of Pengwern, mentioned in the Welsh Cynddylan poetry

(see http://www.kmatthews.org.uk/history/canu_heledd/index.html), as the Shrewsbury of Giraldus Cambrensis.  And this remains true despite the fact that Shrewsbury had its own early Welsh name - Amwythig.

Attempts have been made to place the site elsewhere, of course.  The Berth is popular, especially as it is not too far from Shrewsbury and is only a mile from Baschurch, the Eglwyssau Bassa where Cynddylan was buried.  But there are no pen or gwern names there, and it makes little sense to propose that The Berth was overcome by the English, yet the Welsh prince was buried nearby.  I myself have, in the past, wondered about various hillforts in Wales that can be associated with Wern (= Gwern) place-names.  Some of them are impressive sites, like Middeltown and The Breidden near Trewern and Llanymynech Hill near Wern.  Unfortunately, in all of these cases we either have perfectly good Welsh place-names for the sites in question or we lack something that we could equate with 'Pen-.'

Now, Pen- in Pengwern can mean a number of things.  The word itself, when found in place-names, means 'a head, end, top or height' (Victor Watts, "The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names"). Gwern was originally the word for an alder tree, but as this tree commonly grew in marshy ground, it took on the transferred sense of a bog or marsh.  

I have always thought that Pengwern must have been a significant place.  To learn more about the great Welsh marsh fortresses, I consulted the following very recent work:

Assessing Iron Age Marsh-Forts: With Reference to the Stratigraphy and Palaeoenvironment Surrounding The Berth, North Shropshire by Shelagh Norton, Archaeopress Publishing Ltd, Oct 7, 2021

On p. 69 of that title, the author informs us that "Three large and complex hillforts are located on lowland outcrops overlooking the mosses and wetlands - Old Oswestry, Bury Walls and Nesscliffe."

Nesscliffe is the closest site to Shrewsbury, but lacks any place-names, Welsh or English, that can be connected to Pengwern.  Oswestry is a bit farther away from Shrewsbury that Breidden Hill, but again lacks any place-names in the vicinity that could be linked to Pengwern.

Let us look, then, at Bury Walls (https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1020284?section=official-listing, http://search.shropshirehistory.org.uk/collections/getrecord/CCS_MSA850/, https://www.academia.edu/4237265/Comparison_of_geophysical_techniques_for_investigating_an_infilled_ditch_at_Bury_Walls_hill_fort_Shropshire).  I have posted two maps here:

Notice Moston and Top Moss, both immediately to the SW of the hillfort.  According to A.D. Mills ("A Dictionary of English Place-Names"), Moston is 'moss or marsh farmstead', OE mos + tun.  Top Moss, then, it we opt to take it as face-value, is an exact English rendering of the Welsh Pengwern.  

It appears that this "coincidence" has not been observed before.  The idea that Top Moss = Pengwern is strengthened by the fact that the fort has only an English name, meaning that it must have had a previous Welsh name.  

In Norton's book, she describes Top Moss thusly:

In his discussion of Pengwern candidates in THE CORNOVII, p. 123, Graham Webster notes that Cynddylan is "said to live 'between Tren and Trodwydd', or the Tern and Roden, a large area in which is situated the finest of Shropshire hill-forts, Bury Walls, with swampy ground to the south."

The removal of Cynddylan's body from Bury Walls east of the River Roden to Baschurch well to the west makes sense in the aftermath of a disastrous battle against the English.