IMAGINE having a mountain named after you? Unless you were an egomaniac with self-esteem issues, it would probably feel a bit embarrassing.

But just imagine the mother of all mountains named in your honour?

George Everest did!

Having our surnames grace a majestic and elusive peak located in some faraway and remote place that we’ve never visited is not something most of us have to worry about.

But times were different when George was alive, and back then it wasn’t out of the question to colonise and rename an entire country after the new chap in charge. Does anyone remember Rhodesia or how the Philippines got its name?

So giving an imposing and monumental geographical landmark a new name, regardless of what the locals called it, wasn’t exactly frowned upon.

To be fair, when the world’s highest and most famous peak was named after the Crickhowell gent, he didn’t exactly welcome the news with open arms.

Only the cockiest cockerel would!

Yet, some 160 Years later, how many of us are familiar with Everest’s original name? You know, the one given to it by generations of people living in Tibet.

Chomolungma, also spelled Qomolangma, was the original name of the mountain that the wider world would go on to know as Everest.

Pronounced "CHOH-moh-LUHNG’ the name that Tibetan people had been calling it for centuries means “Goddess Mother of the World.”

It's a lot more poetic than Everest, but in a world often without reason or rhyme, it was renamed Everest in 1865 by the Royal Geographical Society and became the most recognised peak in the world.

As a summit that has a foot in both Tibet and Nepal, the Nepali also have a name for the mountain, and that is Sagarmatha, which means "Goddess of the Sky."

So why was such a fierce, unforgiving, and bewitching peak that was thought to have personified the feminine divine, named after a bloke from Crickhowell called George?

Let's start at the beginning.

George Everest was born in Crickhowell on July 4 1790, and spent a part of his childhood in a "house" that is now better known as the Manor Hotel.

Back in the 18th century, it was known as the Manor of Grernvale.

Some suggest that the family name Everest was pronounced "Eve" and "Rest" but that sounds more like a quaint tavern on some rural back road than a mountain waiting to be conquered.

George would later train for a career in the military and, by the 1820s, was stationed in India during British colonial rule.

George's interests leaned towards surveying, and by 1830, he was the Surveyor General of India.

During this time with the East India company, George was responsible for mapping out huge areas of the Indian subcontinent.

For nearly 40 years, he worked tirelessly to improve the collective knowledge of humanity, but he never saw or mapped Everest.

He did, however, become well versed in the religious customs of India, which, according to his niece Mary Boole, left a big impression upon his westernised train of thought.

Mary wrote, "My uncle, George Everest, was sent to India in 1806 at the age of sixteen. The boy went out ignorant, unspoiled and fresh. He made the acquaintance of a learned Brahman who taught him—not the details of his own ritual, as European missionaries do, but—the essential factor in all true religion, the secret of how man may hold communion with the Infinite Unknown.

"My uncle returned from India. He never interfered with anyone's religious beliefs or customs. But no one under his influence could continue to believe in anything in the Bible being specially sacred, except the two elements which it has in common with other sacred books: the knowledge of our relation to others and of man's power to hold direct converse with the unseen truth."

The "infinite unknown" and the "unseen truth" are what have drawn many people to the 29,029ft mountain named in Everest's honour.

Yet that's not why it was named after him.

It's time for a chap named Andrew Scott Waugh to take centre stage.

In 1852, Colonel Waugh had taken Everest's place as surveyor general of India.

Under his watch, a mathematician in the employ of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, named Radhanath Sikhdar made a formal record of what he believed was the world's highest peak.

Although he was situated over 140 miles away, Radhanath could identify through his surveying instruments "a stupendous snowy mass" just above the hill resort of Darjeeling,

Waugh began comparing and competing Sikhdar's observations with the positions and elevations of other peaks in the Himalayas, and several years later confirmed that the world had a new highest peak.

Kanchenjunga, which had lorded it over the other summits for decades, was displaced by a mountain initially named, wait for it, "Gamma."

Although the natives already had two rich and meaningful names for the mountain, they proved too much of a mouthful and were routinely ignored.

After a brief brainstorming session, "Gamma" was renamed the equally creative, "Peak B" before the name "Peak XV" was finally settled upon.

When it came to Peak XV's official unveiling in front of the world (almost as if the mountain was less a construct of elemental forces and a hidden hand, but more a product of paper mache and Victorian grit), the lads at the Royal Geographical Society decided that the name Peak XV lacked a certain je ne sais quoi.

Wishing to honour his predecessor and the man who gave him his first gig, Waugh wrote, "Here is a mountain most probably the highest in the world without any local name that I can discover. So I propose to perpetuate the memory of that illustrious master of geographical research and recommend it be named Everest.'"

The fellow at the Royal Geographical Society agreed, and Chomolungma or Sagarmatha was forced to carry the surname of a man who had never borne witness to her unfathomable majesty or scaled her dizzying peaks.

In the eyes of the world, she was no longer a mother goddess, but the property of a man from Powys.

Of course, George was a decent fellow and didn't want the peak named in his honour. He felt it was important for local landmarks and places to be named by the locals.

However, Waugh was determined and claimed that no prior existing names for the mountain were known. Furthermore, because both Nepal and Tibet were closed to foreigners at the time, nothing could be confirmed.

However, in the early 20th Century, the celebrated Swedish explorer Sven Hedin found the centuries-old Tibetan name Chomolungma published on a 1733 map by the geographer d,Anville, and Everest's secret name was revealed to the wider world.

Fast forward to modern times, and the name Mount Everest seems carved in the rocks of eternity to each subsequent generation of climbers who view the famous peak as a challenge, a gamble, and a full stop. A symbol of nature's icy and towering indifference and humanity's need to strive, seek, survive and push the limits of what's possible.

All said and done, it's the name Everest that put the peak quite literally on the map, and as a wiseman once said, "What it is, is what it is."

Besides, if you're going to have something named in your honour, you might as well go big!