When is a Hill not a Hill?

For quite a chunk of the 1990s, when James was but a youngster, we rented a place on the A5 road to Bangor, just outside Bethesda and on the crossroads to Tregarth and Rachub. It was called Brynbella Cottage, and whilst hard up against the busy Telford road, it suited us fine at the time because it had a large garden suitably walled and hedged off from the road, where James and his friends could play safely, and where we would subsequently host some fine spit-roast parties and late-night barbecues.

I always wondered about the name of the place: the Bryn part of the name is Welsh for hill, but I could never figure out what the bella bit was about, or its etymology. For whatever reason - too busy in those days, I guess, I never thought to chase it up - and anyhow, the internet as we know it now hardly existed as such: and so I left it at that. However, I was thumbing through my copy of The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles this afternoon - a relatively recent acquisition - and came across an entry for the Brynbella Estate in Clwyd, at Tremeirchion, a restoration of the childhood home of 'Dr. Johnson's Mrs. Thrace' - Hester Lynch Piozzi, of the Salusbury family.

The place was originally named Bach-y-graig and was in a state of dereliction when she revisited it in 1774 with her husband Henry Thrale and Dr. Johnson. After her husband's death in 1781, she married a Gabriel Piozzi and they decided to build a new home for themselves near the top of Tremeirchion Hill, in the form of an Italianate villa, which they duly named Brynbella, appending the Italian for beautiful (f) to the Welsh Bryn. And there we have it: mystery solved. I wonder how many more places have been so-named since that time, and why those that named the cottage at the crossroads in Bethesda chose it, given that it lies in the flat of the valley and not exactly on a hill of any sort...