Tallis's Topographical Dictionary - Gazetteer Transcription

Guide to the Transcribed Gazetteer

Gazetteer design

The transcribed gazetteer is in two separate but interlinked parts, the Place Gazetteer and the River Gazetteer.
The gazetteers are set out in the form of tabulated lists of place-names and river-names, sorted according to the alphabetical conventions adopted in the original publication. Supporting details are set out under column headings identical to those used in the original (see example below):

Name of Place	County	Miles Distant from	Distance from Railway Station	Railway	Dist. Lond. pr Rl.	Area in Sta Acres	Pop.

	Llanystyndwy	pa	Carnarvon	Criccieth	1¾	Pen-y-groes	9¾	Carnarvon Nantlle	263½	6780	1206

1. Name of Place — plus an abbreviation indicating its status e.g. "pa" = parish. A key to all abbreviations can be accessed by clicking on the link in the top panel of the place gazetteer display. The place-names are hyperlinked directly to descriptive text where available.
2. County — for brevity, the ending "...shire" is omitted. Spellings are inconsistent (see below).
3. Miles distant from — a local town is named, together with its distance in miles.
4. Distance from Railway Station — location of, and distance (in miles) from, the nearest railway station (in the 1850s).
5. Railway — name of the railway company serving the nearest railway station.
6. Dist. Lond. pr Rl. — distance from London by rail (in miles).
7. Area in Sta. Acres — area of place listed, in statute (imperial) acres, where 1 acre = 4840 square yards = 0.4 hectare.
8. Pop. — population (no data source is quoted, but possibly from 1851 census).

1. River — name of the river, hyperlinked directly to descriptive text where available.
2. Rises — county in which the river rises.
3. Falls — sea or river into which the named river empties.

Spelling of place-names and rivers

The spellings of Welsh place-names and rivers in the Tallis Topographic Dictionary often differ from those in use today and are subject to many errors and inconsistencies. For example in the entry above, Llanystumdwy is spelt "Llanystyndwy", and Caernarfon is spelt "Carnarvon".
In my on-line version of the work, I have transcribed the names of places and rivers exactly as they are shown in the original work.
Where the spelling of a name in column 1 differs from modern usage I have placed a red "" marker to the left of the name (see example above).

Descriptive texts

Entries in the gazetteer are hyperlinked directly to descriptive text where it is available.
I have extracted the descriptions verbatim directly from the original text. They therefore suffer the same factual errors, typographical errors, inconsistencies of spelling, grammatical errors and errors of syntax as the original publication.

Accessing the gazetteer

To access the transcribed gazetteer click on one of the links below. Then, to find a particular item in the gazetteer, click on the appropriate hyperlinked letter in the top panel of the display. Most sections of the place gazetteer vary in size between 20 kilobytes and 80 kilobytes and will download quickly, but the "L" section (containing more than 450 "LL" entries) occupies 260 kilobytes and is much slower to download. The river gazetteer occupies 26 kilobytes.