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NOTES ON A PLACE-NAME ELEMENT PECULIAR TO BRECONSHIRE By R. F. Peter Powell SOME six miles to the west of the town of Brecon and near the village of Def- ynnog, lies the former parish and modern Community of Maes-car. This name, in the form for consideration in this paper, is one of several dozen place-names containing the element car which occur in Breconshire and, as a Welsh place- name, is confined more-or-less to the pre- 19 74 boundaries of the former County. It is appropriate, therefore, that this place-name element should be the subject for a study in depth in Brycheiniog, especially as local knowledge of the meaning of the word is very scant and the available literature on place-names either avoids or, as will be seen from the notes below, is very diverse in its inter- pretation. Contemporary maps and other relevant literature show some thirty places and features in and near Breconshire containing this element but, to present a fuller picture of its distribution and use, it has been necessary to examine older maps and other sources, such as parish and electoral registers, to reveal some twenty further occurrences. This latter figure contains places which have been lost and some examples which can be proved spurious, but are relevant as they show how a name has changed over the centuries. The accompanying map and the list which follows show the distribution of this name in and near Breconshire and it will be seen that the main groupings occur near Defynnog, as mentioned above, on Mynydd Epynt in what is now the Military Range and in and around the Community of Y Faenor (Vaynor) which contains the largest density of occurrences. The only examples of any significance outside the former County are in the town of Merthyr Tudful, which is close geographically to Y Faenor; a Cwm-car in Radnorshire, mentioned by Theophilus Jones (HB) and quoted later which the author has been unable to locate on modern maps; a group in Herefordshire and a few places in other parts of the British Isles which will be referred to, but not listed. LIST OF PLACE-NAMES CONTAINING THE ELEMENT Car LOCATED IN AND AROUND THE FORMER COUNTY OF BRECONSHIRE All abbreviations used will be found in the Abbreviations, Bibliography and Sources at the end of this paper. For convenience, the names are grouped under communities which, in most cases, correspond with the former parishes. The most recent available version of each name is quoted first and its orthography follows the rules laid down in REL, which does not necessarily agree with the