Among the problems of early Northern history is the location of Gwen Ystrad, where sixth- century Britons commanded by Urien of Rheged repelled an attack. The assault, apparently made by Pictish sea raiders, is described vividly in a poem of Taliesin. But Gwen Ystrad has been unidentified, although it was clearly in Rheged, a territory with its heartland around Penrith, and extending into Lancashire, south- west Scotland and north Yorkshire. In what follows there is a review of previous discussion and then a solution, in which the manuscript's ‘Gwen Ystrad’ is emended to Gwensteri or the River Winster, Cumbria. Despite the novelty of the emendation, we shall see that a location on the Winster was proposed as far back as the 1850s. Admirers of the Victorians will be encouraged to find nineteenth- century scholarship seemingly vindicated in the twenty- first.

Modern awareness of the conflict began in the eighteenth century, when the earliest Welsh poetry (of about the year 600) started to appear in print. In a pioneer collection of Welsh verse and prose, Taliesin's poem on Gwen Ystrad was presented with a translation, declaring that raiders ‘came in a body to Gwenystrad to offer battle; neither the fields nor the woods afforded protection to their enemies when they came in their fury, like the roaring wave rushing in its might to cover the beach’. It was accompanied by another rousing battle poem of Taliesin, on Argoed Llwyfain (possibly by the River Lyvennet, south of Penrith), where Urien Rheged vanquished the English leader Fflamddwyn, leaving ‘many a dead carcase’, so that ‘ravens were coloured’ as they picked at English corpses. The editors of the poems described Urien as ‘King of Cumbria’. But more pertinent is a third poem attributed to Taliesin, which praises not Urien of Rheged but Gwallawg, who ruled the former British kingdom of Elmet, east of Leeds. It recounts his victories, including one on the Gwensteri, long identified as the River Winster, south- east of Windermere.

These poems in the fourteenth- century Book of Taliesin reappear in an edition famed for the accuracy of its text and the absurdity of its commentary. The absurdity appears in its explanation of ‘Gwen Ystrad’ as ‘warrior’s dale’, its locating near Carmarthen and its identification of Gwensteri as Basingwerk, Flintshire.