Vyrnwy, a river which rises on the borders of Merioneth and Montgomery and joins the Severn miles above Welshpool. By engineering operations, begun in 1881, the waters of the upper Vyrnwy have been impounded for the water-supply of Liverpool; and when the new supply was laid on, 14th July 1892, there was an artificial lake of 1121 acres, miles long by broad, and containing 2103 million cubic feet of water. The retaining wall consists of cyclopean stones, is 100 feet high, and is sunk 60 feet below ground. By the track the water follows, the distance is 68 miles from Liverpool.
W
the twenty-third letter of our alphabet, is, like æ, a ligature rather than a letter, as is implied by the name, double u. In very early West Saxon MSS. the sound is represented by uu, a digraph for which the Northumbrian rune p, called wen, was substituted, and not entirely disused till the 13th century, except in Anglo-Norman MSS., such as Domesday Book, where the French scribes used uu for medials, and for initials the capital form VV, which, when ligatured, became our W. The sound, which is nearly that of the Greek digamma and of the Roman consonantal V, is produced by rounding the lips as in uttering u, and at the same time contracting the aperture and drawing in the cheeks, so that the breath cannot escape without friction. When the sound is voiced we have w, as in the words 'we' or 'wen,' the corresponding unvoiced sound being wh, as in 'when,' 'which,' or 'what.' The A.S. hw has now become wh, the aspiration being almost lost in southern English, but in the north the old sound has been preserved, and we still hear hwich and hwat instead of 'which' and 'what.' In the old combination wr the symbol w has been preserved, but its sound has been lost, as in the words 'wright,' 'wrench,' 'wrong,' 'wrist.' The combination ew has become qu, as in 'quoth' from ewæth, 'queen' from ewæn, and 'quench' from ewencan. The w is occasionally intrusive, as in 'whole' from hāl, and 'whore' from hōre. The intrusive w is probably due to analogy, and is useful as distinguishing the words from the homophones 'hole' and 'hoar.' A final w is vocalic, as in 'few' and 'new,' where the spellings are survivals from the A.S. fēwa and nīwe, in which w was a consonant. Here the consonantal sound has been lost, owing to the loss of the final colliding vowel. The lips were rounded to pronounce u, and then contracted to pronounce the following vowel, and when this disappeared only the sound of u was left. So in the French oui the sound of w is produced by rounding the lips to pronounce ou (our u), and then narrowing them for the i. We find w in a few modern French loan-words, such as 'whist' and 'whisky,' but the sound is usually represented by ou, as in 'Edouard.' In old French loan-words an initial w was represented by gu, as Guillaume for William. In modern Welsh a vocalic w, when short, has the sound of oo in 'good;' when long, of oo in 'boon.'