Many people are familiar with the name of that village on the island of Anglesey in Wales with the unfeasibly long name that is generally abbreviated to Llanfairpwllgwyngyll or Llanfair PG. At fifty-eight letters long this is generally accepted as the longest placename in the United Kingdom, but was purely an invention of the nineteenth century Welsh tourist industry for the entertainment of gullible English visitors. The twentieth century Welsh tourist industry sought to go one (or to be pedantic eight) better and come up with;
Gorsafawddachaidraigodanheddogleddolonpenrhynareurdraethceredigion
Whose sixty-six letters of rather mangled and decidedly fake Welsh can roughly be translated as 'the station on the Mawddach with dragon's teeth under the North Penrhyn Road on the golden Cardigan sands'.
Although this is certainly a longer name than its northern rival, it is doubtful whether it strictly qualifies as a placename since, Gorsafawddach, which lies some two miles south of Barmouth, is simply a railway platform on the privately owned narrow gauge Fairborne and Barmouth Railway with a population of zero. As it happens, the station is near to the coast next to the North Penrhyn Road but sadly, the dragon's teeth turn out to be nothing more than some surviving World War II anti-tank blocks.
SOURCES
- John Ayto and Ian Crofton, Brewer's Britain and Ireland (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005)
- Myths about Welsh
http://gwybodiadur.worldonline.co.uk/myths.htm