Domains Beneath the Sea

The western cost of Britain harbours several legends that tell of lost lands, including Lethowsow, between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly. In France, along the coast of Brittany, similar tales have been told since the twelfth century, notably of he city of Ker-ls, now supposedly covered by the Bay of Douarnenez.

      Ker-ls, built on land reclaimed from the sea and defended by dykes, was said to be ruled by King Gradlon. One night his daughter Dahut, in league with an enemy, stole the keys of the sluice-gates. When she opened them, Ker-ls was drowned, and Gradlon alone escaped on horseback. Bretons strongly believed such stories – as late as 1792 a candle burnt perpetually in the chapel of Notre-Dame de Gueodet, in Quimper, to prevent a nearby well from overflowing and flooding the city.

      William Worcester (1415-1482) first mentioned an unnamed lost Cornish land in the fifteenth century. He spoke of woods and meadows and 140 parish churches, all now submerged between St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. A century later the antiquary Richard Carew identified the land as Lethowsow. He related the legend that, when the sea overwhelmed this land, one man escaped on a white horse.

      Richard Carew also identified Lethowsow with Lyonesse, in Arthurian legend the home of Tristan, nephew of King Mark of Carnwall, although its earlier name ‘Leonois’ indicates Lyonesse was Lothian in Scotland. Tales of the lost land off Cornwall were seemingly supported by objects found in the sea near the Seven Stones rocks, called Tregva in Cornish, mwaning ‘a dwelling’. Here fishermen said they had hauled up pieces of doors and windows.

      Despite these stories, it is unlikely that a great flood once affected the whole Celtic world. Although writers as late as the fourth century AD reffered to the Scillies as basically one island, and archaeological evidence suggests that the sea encroached on them in Roman times, oceanographers say that land subsidence around Britain in the early Iron Age was gradual. The most probable explanation is that stories of drowned lands arose partly from observation of submerged buildings and forests, and partly from the same tale being adapted to different places – in the same tradition as that of Atlantis.