Nidum
Attested: Nido in iter 12 of the Antonine Itinerary
Where: Nidum is generally assumed to be the Roman fort inside the modern town of Neath, at SS74749773, a little way up the river Neath from the coast. However, to fit the Itinerary's mileages a better guess might be the marching camp at Blaen-cwm-Bach on a hilltop at SS79709878, just upstream of Aberdulais, overlooking a flat-bottomed basin around Clyne, where the river would have meandered through a swamp.
Name origin: Similar river names include the Nidd in Yorkshire and the Nith through Dumfries, plus up to a dozen more across Europe that were originally *Nida, *Neida, or *Neda (Krahe 1963), which are discussed here as most likely referring to a swampy, low-lying basin at the point where the river was named. There are plenty of parallels in Germanic languages, such as English beneath, but not in Celtic.
Notes: Many of the Roman troops who invaded Wales came from Germanic regions near the Rhine. Unsatisfactory explanations include the ‘shining’ idea of Ekwall (1928), any link to Welsh nyth ‘nest’ from Latin nidus, plus conceivably Greek νηδυς ‘womb, belly’, said to be derived from *nizdos ‘sit-down place’.
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