Ceredigion, Sir Aberteifi or Cardiganshire? The County Name Explained

What is the proper Welsh name for Cardiganshire, the historic County of Cardigan: Ceredigion or Sir Aberteifi? Both answers have history behind them – but they are not quite saying the same thing.

Cardiganshire is one of the historic counties of Wales. In Welsh, however, two different names have long been associated with the county: Ceredigion and Sir Aberteifi.

That sometimes produces an apparently simple question: which one is the authentic Welsh name?

The historical evidence gives a more interesting answer.

Both are authentic. Ceredigion is the older indigenous name of the territory itself, while Sir Aberteifi is the traditional Welsh counterpart of the county name Cardiganshire.

For that reason, RealCounties normally presents the geographic county as Cardiganshire / Ceredigion, while recognising Sir Aberteifi as a genuine historic alternative Welsh county name.

Two names from two different traditions

The key to understanding the apparent contradiction is that the names come from two related but distinct traditions.

Ceredigion is fundamentally a territorial name.

Its name-family reaches far back into Welsh history and refers to the country associated traditionally with Ceredig. Whatever uncertainty surrounds the details of the earliest narratives, there is no serious doubt that Ceredigion is an ancient Welsh geographical name.

Sir Aberteifi, on the other hand, belongs to the familiar tradition of naming a county from its county town.

Cardigan is Aberteifi in Welsh. Sir Aberteifi therefore means, in effect, the county of Aberteifi — making it the natural Welsh counterpart of Cardiganshire.

So the two names answer slightly different questions.

If we are asking for the older indigenous Welsh name of the territory, Ceredigion has the stronger claim.

If we are asking for the traditional Welsh equivalent of Cardiganshire, Sir Aberteifi is the direct equivalent.

There is no contradiction in recognising both.

Ceredigion has the deeper documentary history

The evidence for Ceredigion is particularly early.

The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales’s Historic Place Names of Wales database records the historic county under the head-name “Cardiganshire / Ceredigion” and specifically identifies it as a historic county.

Among its recorded forms is Ceredigiawn, dating from between 1100 and 1137. The spelling Ceredigion itself is documented by 1520–1530.

That makes the Ceredigion name-family substantially older in the documentary record than the surviving examples of an Aberteifi-based county name.

It is important, however, not to make the evidence say more than it does. The early appearance of Ceredigion establishes the antiquity of the territorial name. It does not by itself establish that every precise boundary of the later geographic county had already assumed its eventual form by the twelfth century.

Names, territories and the exact development of boundaries are related questions, but they are not identical ones.

But Sir Aberteifi is certainly historic too

Calling Sir Aberteifi a modern translation would be equally mistaken.

The Royal Commission records an Aberteifi-based county form, “Swydh Abertivi”, in 1568, while Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru provides an example of Sir Aberteifi from 1606.

So this is not a recent attempt to manufacture a Welsh equivalent of Cardiganshire.

It has centuries of Welsh usage behind it.

Its logic is straightforward. The town known in English as Cardigan is Aberteifi in Welsh. Just as the English county name Cardiganshire is derived from Cardigan, Sir Aberteifi derives the county name from Aberteifi.

That makes Sir Aberteifi an entirely natural and historically established Welsh county name.

What it does not make it is the earliest Welsh geographical name of the country.

That distinction belongs to Ceredigion.

Both names remained alive

Perhaps the strongest evidence against treating this as a story in which one name simply replaced another is that both remained in use.

The nineteenth century provides a particularly neat example.

The Dictionary of Welsh Biography records two works published only a year apart:

Enwogion Sir Aberteifi — 1868

and

Enwogion Ceredigion — 1869.

The existence of those near-contemporary titles is revealing. Welsh speakers could use either naming tradition without one rendering the other obsolete.

An even stronger piece of evidence comes from Thomas Nicholas’s Annals and Antiquities of the Counties and County Families of Wales, published in 1872.

Nicholas’s section is headed “Cardiganshire”, yet when discussing the earlier history of the country he explains that the region came to be known as Ceredigion. More importantly, he says that:

the country was from a distant period called Ceredigion, and is still so called in the Welsh language

That is unusually valuable evidence because Nicholas was not retrospectively reviving an obsolete medieval expression. He was writing in the nineteenth century and explicitly describing Ceredigion as a living Welsh geographical name at that time.

His work subsequently moves naturally between Ceredigion when discussing the country historically and Cardiganshire as the established English county name.

Where does Cardiganshire fit in?

Cardiganshire is the established English name of the historic county.

Like many shire names, it derives from its county town: Cardigan.

This produces a particularly elegant relationship between the three names:

Cardiganshire — the established English county name, derived from Cardigan.

Sir Aberteifi — the corresponding Welsh county-town name, derived from Aberteifi.

Ceredigion — the older indigenous Welsh territorial name.

That is why trying to identify a single “correct” name can be misleading.

The answer depends on what kind of name we are asking about.

The modern council area complicates things

There is another reason for present-day confusion: Ceredigion is also used as the name of a council area.

That can create the false impression that Ceredigion is a modern administrative invention which has somehow displaced the older county name Cardiganshire.

It is nothing of the sort.

Ceredigion existed as a geographical name many centuries before today’s local-government arrangements. Its modern administrative use borrowed an ancient territorial name; it did not create that name.

There is an interesting twist here.

The Local Government (Wales) Act 1994 originally gave a newly created principal local-government area the English and Welsh names Cardiganshire and Sir Aberteifi.

That provides strong evidence that Sir Aberteifi was regarded as a proper Welsh equivalent of Cardiganshire.

But it does not settle the historical naming question.

The legislation was naming a new council area. It was not defining the historically primary Welsh name of the geographic county.

As elsewhere in Britain, the geographic county and the council area are separate geographical layers. A local-government enactment can name or rename an administrative area without determining the identity or historical terminology of the enduring county.

So which name should we use?

For RealCounties, the strongest historical presentation is:

Cardiganshire / Ceredigion

with:

Sir Aberteifi recognised prominently as an alternative traditional Welsh county name.

That presentation has an additional advantage: it is also the pairing used for the historic county by the Royal Commission’s Historic Place Names of Wales database.

This does not make Cardiganshire / Sir Aberteifi wrong.

Far from it.

If the aim is a rigid bilingual shire-name convention — alongside forms such as Carmarthenshire / Sir Gaerfyrddin or Pembrokeshire / Sir Benfro — then Cardiganshire / Sir Aberteifi is both historically defensible and linguistically logical.

But that is a presentational convention.

It does not alter the deeper historical point: Ceredigion has the greater antiquity as the indigenous Welsh geographical name of the territory.

Not either/or

The history therefore resists the simple choice sometimes demanded of it.

Ceredigion is not merely the name of a present-day council area.

Sir Aberteifi is not a modern translation invented to accompany Cardiganshire.

And neither name needs to be dismissed in order to establish the authenticity of the other.

They represent two longstanding ways of naming the same country.

Ceredigion reaches back into the older Welsh territorial tradition. Sir Aberteifi expresses the county through the name of its county town, just as Cardiganshire does in English.

That is why RealCounties uses Cardiganshire / Ceredigion as its normal presentation while continuing to recognise Sir Aberteifi as an authentic historic Welsh county name.

Sometimes the most accurate answer to a naming dispute is not to choose between two historic names.

It is to understand why both exist.