Town's name is no tongue twister for Pasco woman

NEW PORT RICHEY (FOX 13) - The viral video of a British weatherman pronouncing Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch makes it look easy, but it's not.

"Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch," Susan Brookes says without flinching.

Brookes can do more than just say the name of that Welsh community.  Having visited it, she can tell you all  about it.

"The time when I went, there were steam trains. It was a very long time ago. It was very quaint," she said.

Brookes is an executive secretary for the Pasco Sheriff's Office, but she grew up a world away in Liverpool, England.

"My mother, her sister, and her mother were evacuated to north Wales at the beginning of the second World War," she said.

And it's there where she first heard of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch.

"One day she started telling me about this train station she'd been to.  It had a very unusual name," she said. "I kept repeating it and repeating it."

In Welsh it means "The Church of Mary in the hollow of the white hazel near the fierce whirlpool and the Church of Tysilio by the red cave."

It's the longest name of a place in Europe.