Baby born in Wales, named y-Felin (“the mill”)

Welsh singer/songwriter Cerys Matthews and her husband welcomed their first child, a baby girl, in August of 2003.

They named her Glenys Pearl y-Felin.

The first two names are family names. The third, on the other hand, is Welsh for “the mill.”

Y-Felin (which I believe is pronounced uh VEL-in) is a reference to the ruins of a water mill located in the small Welsh village of Trefin, where the singer’s parents live.

For five centuries, the mill was used to ground wheat and barley. It closed in 1918.

The abandoned mill was memorialized in the famous Welsh poem “Melin Trefin,” written in the 1930s by a Welsh poet/preacher with a reduplicated name: William Williams. (He was also known by the bardic name Crwys, meaning “cross.”)

Sources:

Image: Water mill at Aber Draw by Lis Burke under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.