Volume Nine - Pre-Victorian to the present day - even more aspects - Cefn-y-Wrâch . . .

Best says : - "One river tench is worth £10." The muddy firth of the Taff, at Cardiff, formerly, when there were in St. George's Channel a great many more, and several other sorts of fish, than there are at present, was a very likely place for vast shoals of the tench, or wrach, so that a shallow part, which these gregarious fish were known to occupy, very naturally became to be called Cefn-y-wrach ; which is much more likely than an old witch cast into the channel raised the ground into a shoal ! We have instances of places in channels, rivers, and brooks, called after the fish found therein, such as Nant-ybrithyll (trout brook), Llyn-yr-afanc (beaver-pool), &c.

The English word, wrasse seems to me a corruption of the Welsh, wrach, for I cannot find it, in any form - not even the root - in the Saxon. Nor is it in Johnson's folio edition. This suggest that, in his time, wrasse was a provincial word. The English (imperfectly-formed) mouth could not utter the guttural ch, in wrach, any more than in chwant (want), in chwiff (whiff), or in Baruch - the name of the island they call Barry ; therefore they said wrasse (rass). That wrasse is a corruption of wrach or gwrach is rendered almost into certainty by the fact that the English called the tench the old wife, as has already been shown.

Now, the name, old wife could not have been given by the English to the tench, except by learning from the Welsh that gwrach meant an old woman, a hag, or a witch. That the word gwrach has been, and still is used in this sense does not admit of the least doubt. But that the shallow place in the water where the tench were usually caught in great numbers, had the name Cefn-y-wrach, from an old witch, or from any similarity to the back of a witch, or to a heap of hay, by no means follows. Gwrach is the appropriate Welsh name of the fish, whether found at Cefn-y-wrach of Cardiff, or elsewhere ; so that there is no connection between the name of the fish, or of the place, Cefn-y-wrach, and any particular "old wife," old woman, or old witch. - South Wales Daily News  [136] [325] 15th May 1878.