Blackwood

Alternative Name: Coed Duon
Morphology: coed+du in its plural form
Phonetic: koy-dee-on

The town was established in the early 1820s by J.H. Moggridge to provide decent housing for workers. Though originally called Tremoggridge in his honour, the town subsequently took its name from woods in the area. Rather than literally meaning trees that were black, the name comes from the fact that the woods were very dense and dark. In 1996, when Caerphilly County Borough Council came into existence after local government re-organisation, seven variations in spelling were found to exist on road signage and official documents for this town. Some were clearly incorrect, such as Y Coedion but most of the others were capitalisation and hyphenation differences – such as Coed-duon, Coed Duon, Y Coed-Duon, Coed-Duon with seemingly little consistency even within individual documents or road signs within a small geographic area. Coed dduon was shown on Monmouthshire maps in the mid 19th century. One late 20th century sign (luckily prevented from being put in place) bore the far too literal translation of Du Pren (it is believed this was due to a well-meaning use of a dictionary to try and save translation time). Local research was undertaken and the two most commonly used options were offered – the majority of replies at the time noted Coed Duon as the one preferred and so this has been the one used by the local authority in documents and on road signs since then. Y Coed Duon is the alternate version in use and the use of one version over the other is a source of great debate. In fact it is that debate that originally began the process in 1998 that has led to the creation of this comprehensive place names list.