The Pembrokeshire Landsker

Since part of Martha Morgan Country coincides with part of the "Landsker Zone" of Pembrokeshire, it's appropriate to flag up this rather quirky feature of Pembrokeshire geography and history.  The Landsker has been there for a very long time, and its stability is quite extraordinary, given that it has never coincided with an administrative boundary -- at least, not within the past few centuries -- and has never been properly demarcated or fortified.  It is nowadays above all else a LINGUISTIC line -- but it also features in the mental maps of the local people, who know (more or less) where it is, and who themselves always identify either with the Welshry (to the north) or the Englishry (to the south).  

The Medieval Landsker

When I was an undergraduate in Oxford, in 1962, I presented a dissertation on the Landsker as part of my degree course.  It was remarkably crude, but it whetted my appetite for this strange phenomenon, and I have been interested in it ever since.  I walked the whole route of the Lansker as part of my research -- that was not easy, since plenty of routes cross it, but hardly any run along it.  Such is the way with frontiers.......

Then in 1971 I used the opportunity on a Durham University student field course to do some serious research, and the wotk I did with the mostly-willing students remains the most detailed piece of research ever done on the Landsker.  The maps presented here arose from that research.

​In the Middle Ages the Landsker looked something like this: