Lonydd Cymraeg — Welsh Lanes
Wales is an officially bilingual nation, and its roads reflect that — in principle. Many lanes across Wales carry a Welsh-language name: Lôn, a word borrowed into Welsh from the English "lane" during the nineteenth century. In Pembrokeshire and parts of Ceredigion, the dialect word Feidr is often used instead.
In practice, however, the Ordnance Survey’s record of Welsh lane names is patchy. Wales has 2,453 named lanes in this dataset. Of those, 692 have Lôn or Feidr as their primary recorded name. A further 95 English-named lanes have a Welsh alternative recorded alongside them. That leaves 1,666 lanes in Wales, the large majority, with no Welsh name in the OS data at all. Under Welsh Government bilingual naming policy, those roads should carry both. The most likely explanation is that local authorities across Wales have been inconsistent in submitting bilingual road name data to Ordnance Survey, which records only what it receives.
One further detail worth noting: most Lôn entries in the OS Open Names database are mistakenly recorded without the circumflex, or tô bach, diacritic — Lon rather than the correct Lôn. Of the 692 Welsh-primary lanes in this dataset, only 85 carry the proper diacritic; the remaining 607 have lost it somewhere between the road sign and the database. That too is a shortcoming in the source data, not this website.
Lanes with Welsh-language names, by county
Click any lane name below to find it on the map.
The most common Welsh lane names
Unlike English lanes, Welsh lane names rarely repeat across the country — the most common appears just nine times
The Feidr lanes of Pembrokeshire
While lôn is a 19th-century borrowing from English, feidr is the older, indigenous Welsh word for a narrow lane or passage. It survives almost exclusively in Pembrokeshire and parts of Ceredigion — the communities where Welsh has been spoken longest and English influence took longest to arrive. These thirty-three lanes are its remaining footprint in the official record.
When the two names tell different stories
These lanes carry official names in both languages — but the Welsh and English names don't always agree. Sometimes they describe different things entirely, a sign that the two naming traditions developed independently
Weird Lanes
Britain’s lane names are a window into a thousand years of local history, dark humour, and sheer eccentricity. Some have always been rude. Some have aged badly. Some were named on a Friday afternoon. Click any lane to find it on the map.
Themes
Six thematic journeys through Britain’s lane names — from the sacred to the edible, the natural world to the world of work. Click any term to search for all matching lanes.
Statistics
The hundred most common lane names
Click any name to search for it on the map.