Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report

Lyonesse: a land lost to the void

The medieval tradition describes an ancient land located beyond the southwestern boundary of England. Is there any truth to this legend? What was the connection between Lyonesse and King Arthur or the Celts?

Lyonesse: a land lost to the void
Pin it

Anyone, on a clear day, gazing from Land's End, the southwestern tip of England, towards the Scilly Isles, will have no trouble imagining that, in a distant past, a flourishing country once existed between these islands and the mainland.

It was, in the words of the English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, the "lost land of Lyonesse, where, apart from the Scilly Isles, today only the stormy sea stretches." Did this place truly exist, or was it merely the dream of a poet? The legend of a great flood appears in the traditions of many peoples across different parts of the world—Asia, Australia, the Pacific, and the Americas.

The most famous in the Western world is the "Flood of Noah," recounted in the Book of Genesis, based on an ancient Mesopotamian tale. An intriguing fact is that Africa does not have a similar myth among its traditions.

As for Western Europe, according to folklore scholars, it derived its flood stories from Mesopotamia, through the Greek legend of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and the biblical story of Noah. However, it is likely that in Europe, the tradition of a local flood was more widespread, caused not by rain but by the invasion of the sea, probably due to the collapse of the land—an account of "lost lands" reminiscent of Atlantis.

From the Middle Ages and subsequent periods, many such stories have reached us, especially regarding the coasts of England and, in France, Brittany. The most celebrated of these "submerged lands" is certainly Lyonesse.

The first written mention of a vanished land off the coast of Cornwall appears in the Itinerary of William of Worcester from the 15th century. He speaks of "forests, fields, and 140 parish churches, now all sunken, between the Mount and the Scilly Isles." However, he does not give this submerged land any name.

The antiquarian Richard Carew, a native of Cornwall, was perhaps the first to identify the vanished kingdom beneath the sea with the Lyonesse of the Arthurian legend. This view is noted in William Camden's Britannia and later in Carew's The Survey of Cornwall (1602).

He wrote: "And the sea, overflowing everywhere, completely devastated the territory of Lyonesse, and many other vast areas. The following evidence remains for the existence of Lyonesse: the space between Land's End and the Scilly Isles, about thirty miles, still retains that name in the Cornish language—Lethosow—and measures a depth of 40 to 60 fathoms at every point, a rather unusual feature for open sea."

Moreover, halfway between Land's End and the Scilly Isles was a group of rocks known as "the Seven Stones," which marked an area locally referred to as Tregva, "a dwelling." Some fishermen reported having recovered remains of doors and windows at this spot.

In Carew's time, a legend was told about Lethosow, which said that when the sea flooded and submerged the land, a man named Trevilian managed to escape on a white horse galloping ahead of the encroaching waves. This story was then used to explain the origin of the Trevelyan family crest: a horse rising from the sea.

In the Arthurian cycle, Lyonesse is the homeland of the hero Tristan, nephew of King Mark and lover of his wife, Isolde. Since Mark was the ruler of Cornwall, Carew and another author believed that the local "lost land" and Lyonesse were one and the same. Medievalists do not accept this hypothesis, holding that "Lyonesse" is a corrupted form of an older name assigned to Tristan's land, "Loenois," now Lothian, in Scotland. This placement aligns with the fact that the name Tristan belonged to a prince of the Picts from the 8th century.

Since the lost land of Cornwall has been identified with Lyonesse, it has been shrouded in the luminous allure of the Arthurian legend.

Other connections have been made: Alfred Lord Tennyson placed the court of Camelot there, and mystics have begun to hope that Lyonesse might emerge from the waves or appear in a vision off the coast of Land's End.

Lyonesse: a land lost to the void
Pin it

Like Atlantis, Lyonesse has become a powerful symbol expressing the longing for a lost Golden Age, and, in the case of Cornwall, for a past more glorious than the present.
Is there any evidence to support the tradition?

The Cornish historian William Borlase, in 1753, mentioned rows of stones, possibly marking the site of a vanished land, stretching from the shores of Samson Flats in the Scilly Isles. Resembling field boundary walls, they were believed to be the work of humans, and in the 1920s, some suggested they were ancient boundary lines from the Bronze Age.

Today, however, oceanographers state that in order to submerge cultivated fields, the sea level would have had to rise by more than 3.7 meters over the past three millennia. Such a phenomenon does not align with the data we have on recent marine changes around Great Britain. A more plausible theory is that the "walls" were fish traps, submerged during high tides. They would not be the only evidence that the Scilly Isles have lost land to the sea. In fact, off the coasts of the islands of St Martin, Little Arthur, and Tean, there are prehistoric hut circles and tombs that are believed to have been covered by water in Roman times. In any case, it is a well-established fact that classical authors referred to the Scilly Isles as one single, or fundamentally single, island until the 4th century AD.

However, during the Iron Age, the land subsidence around the coasts of England was very slow. The sinking must have been gradual and intermittent, not concentrated in a single, traumatic event that could be recorded, remembered, and passed down by a person.

The story of Lethosow/Lyonesse has an equivalent in Brittany, where, beneath the depths of Douarnenez Bay, lies the submerged city of Kerls. Only King Gradlon managed to escape the catastrophe, riding a white steed, like Trevilian, ahead of the waves.

Both legends refer to 6th-century heroes and both belong to the Celtic world. Although there is no evidence of a large-scale flood occurring in Celtic areas during that time, it is possible that exceptionally high tides, like those of 1953 along the eastern English coast, may have caused a local disaster.

St Michael's Mount
Pin it
St Michael's Mount

It is possible that when the monks of Mont Saint-Michel Abbey in Brittany founded the daughter house of St Michael's Mount in Cornwall, they brought with them the story of the flood. Whatever the origin of the legend, it is not hard to believe in a flooding that, like all disasters, was later exaggerated by popular imagination: perhaps the lost village became a city, and the city even a kingdom. The descendants forgot the exact location of the catastrophe and placed it where there were “evidence” in the form of submerged “buildings.”

As for the time period, it naturally became the heroic age of the Celts, of King Arthur, Gradlon, and Tristan.

← previous
next →
loading
sending ...
New to Neperos ? Sign Up for free
download Neperos App from Google Play
install Neperos as PWA

Let's discover also

Recent Articles

Recent Comments

Neperos cookies
This website uses cookies to store your preferences and improve the service. Cookies authorization will allow me and / or my partners to process personal data such as browsing behaviour.

By pressing OK you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge the Privacy Policy

By pressing REJECT you will be able to continue to use Neperos (like read articles or write comments) but some important cookies will not be set. This may affect certain features and functions of the platform.
OK
REJECT