The Matriarchs of Wetwang Slack

Exciting news in the worlds of ancient DNA and Celtic archaeology:

Kinship practices underpin all traditional societies, forming the basis for socially sanctioned reproductive unions, residence patterns and the inheritance of rights and property. Although the relationship between biological relatedness and kinship is not always straightforward, ancient DNA studies are increasingly used to examine the extent to which biological relatedness underpinned social constructs of kinship in prehistoric societies. Here, we report the analysis of genome-wide data for 534 individuals from the Arras Culture of Middle Iron Age northeast England (including 390 from Wetwang Slack, 100 from Pocklington, and 29 from Melton), finding evidence for communities with kinship systems structured along matrilineal lines. At Wetwang Slack, we reconstruct a 13-generation pedigree comprising 195 individuals structured around female-line connections: matrilineal transmissions greatly outnumbered patrilineal ones and male reproductive partners were largely absent from the cemetery, plausibly because they were buried in their own natal communities. Furthermore, the three main sites with robust sample sizes were characterised by non-overlapping dominant mitochondrial haplogroups, implying a maternal clan-based structure. Reproductive unions at Wetwang Slack suggest a recurrent alliance between two dominant maternal descent groups, with members of each group never reproducing with members of their own maternal lineage. Meanwhile, three individuals from lavishly furnished chariot burials at Wetwang Slack were close maternal relatives belonging to a lineage with consecutive generations of close kin unions, a pattern largely absent among other individuals at the site. These results indicate highly distinctive social practices among an elite group embedded in the wider kinship network of the Arras community.

Besides having an awesome name, Wetwang Slack is a very famous archaeological site, especially because of the three chariot burials, all of which were women.

View of one of the burials

Wetwang Slack is generally associated with the Arras Culture of northeastern Britain, which dates from around 450 BC to the Roman conquest. Who these people were is a complicated question. They certainly seem culturally Celtic – just look at their jewelry! – but it has been much disputed whether they were recent immigrants. The new study says no:

The cultural affiliation of the Arras Culture has long been debated because of its use of square barrows, chariot burials and La Tène-style objects, which have often invited comparison with Iron Age communities in continental Europe, particularly groups from the Paris Basin. However, our genetic data do not support a model in which the individuals buried in Arras Culture cemeteries derived from a recent migration of individuals from the Continent. Genome wide ancestry was highly homogeneous across Arras sites and burial contexts, and qpAdm modelling using Iron Age individuals from France as the sole ancestry source provided a poor fit. . . . These results suggest that the distinctive Arras funerary tradition of East Yorkshire reflects local British communities participating in broader La Tène-connected cultural networks, rather than the establishment of a recently arrived continental population.

Reconstruction of a Wetwang Slack chariot

Now these folks, the elite of Bronze and Iron Age Europe, were the descendants of invaders from the steppes. Those invaders were patrilineal and, so far as we can tell, patriarchal as well. So how did the people of the Arras Culture end up matrilineal? Good question! 

The authors of this study don't have a clue.

Another interesting discovery is that members of two of the three great matrilineal lineages married each other regularly, as if they were moities, or reciprocal clans, something documented by archaeologists around the world but not mentioned in any written source about the Celts:

Among 45 reproductive unions for which both maternal 374 lineages could be assigned, 25 involved one partner carrying the major T2e1a1b haplotype 375 and the other H1ao (Fig. 3e). Thus, more than half of the reproductive unions at Wetwang 376 Slack joined the two dominant matrilines at the site.

My overall take is that the Arras Culture was a unique thing, obviously influenced by continental Celts but preserving many aspects of local Bronze Age culture, including, perhaps, matrilineal descent and prominent political roles for women.

Fascinating.

Olalde et al., Ancient DNA reveals matrilineal organisation and recurrent unions between dominant matrilines in Iron Age Britain, bioRxiv preprint

Anglo-Saxon Horned Warrior

This wonderful artifact is known as the Lynsted Die Stamp. It was found by a metal detectorist in Kent, and purchased by the British government through the Portable Antiquities Scheme. It measures 3x4 centimeters, or 1.2 x 1.6 inches.

According to the PAS,

The die would have been used to produce rectangular Pressblech foils, probably to decorate helmets or other high-status military equipment. The Lynsted die is very close in size to some of the decorative rectangular panels on the Sutton Hoo helmet, though its design differs from those on that artefact.

This dancing warrior with the horned helmet has several parallels in Scandinavian art.

This example, one of the Torslunda Plates, seems to be blind in one eye, which is one reason why this figure is usually interpreted as Odin.

The other reason people see this as Odin is that the "horns" are actually birds, likely ravens.

What a terrific find.

Riots in Northern Ireland

So, there are riots in Northern Ireland again, but this time the Catholics and Protestants are on the same side. Is that progress?

Weapons of Bronze Age Scotland

The Scottish National Museum is putting on an exhibit called Scotland's First Warriors featuring weapons and shields from the Bronze Age. Personally I think there was already war in the Neolithic, if not earlier, but this stuff is cool so we'll let that slide. Above is a sword from the Carnoustie Hoard.

Sword from the same hoard. This stuff was deliberately buried just outside a large wooden hall. A fragmentary wooden scabbard was found with the sword, radiocarbon dated to around 1000 BC.

But the best thing in the exhibit is these six shields. Wow.

With a curator for scale. Twenty-two similar shields are known, all but one found in Britain. The metal is quite thin, so they were probably for show rather than combat. Most of them were found in bogs, so they were ritually deposited; I wonder if they were made specifically for an elaborate ritual that ended with their being offered to the gods.

Alderney Roman Fort

Alderney is one of the Channel Islands, little bits of British territory off the French coast. Alderney boasts one town and a bunch of old fortifications. These include an Elizabethan fort (above),

a substantial set of forts and batteries built in the 1800s, 

and several concrete blockhouses built by the Nazis. 

All of which was probably a waste of time, because most experts who have looked at the place have deemed it fundamentally indefesible:

The island was never able to effectively defend itself and survived attack mainly from being too poor and insignificant to be worth the expense of raiding. 

Gladstone dismissed the 19th-century plan of fortification as

a monument of human folly, useless to us...but perhaps not absolutely useless to a possible enemy, with whom we may at some period have to deal and who may possibly be able to extract some profit in the way of shelter and accommodation from the ruins

The WW II Allies simply ignored the place, leaving its very hungry defenders to surrender at the end of the war.

But besides all those well documented forts, there is this thing, known as The Nunnery. What is it?

Well, it looks like a Roman fort, albeit with a few later additions. The stonework seems Roman, and the shape closely resembled the four Roman "signal stations" along the east coast of Yorkshire. But the walls of those signal stations survive to about knee height. Who ever heard of a Roman fort with standing walls 18 feet high?

Debate about the site therefore raged for more than 150 years.

Excavations carried out in 2008 to 2011 finally nailed the site's origin: Roman artifacts found around the foundation confirm that it is indeed a Roman fort. It now bills itself the best preserved Roman fort in Britain.

Elizabethan records describe a tall tower standing in the center of the fort, but that disappeared before any archaeologist got a good look at it. But they did find the foundations, which showed that this tower was pretty big, leading them to reconstruct it like this. I don't know how could you tell from the foundations that the walls went straight up, rather than some sort of pyramid? But anyway this is the official interpetation.

I learned about this from a sort of New Year's best wishes email I received from a regular reader of this blog who lives in Alderney. I loved learning about Alderney, and I love knowing that I have readers around the world.

Education and Ideological Variance

Interesting British finding about how people vary within the left or right by education. In this poll, economic views vary across the horizontal line, while social views vary vertically. Leftists broadly agree about economics, but vary a lot on social issues; more educated leftists are generally more socially liberal than less-educated leftists.

Among conservatives (the blue dots across the top), there is much agreement about social issues. The variance is mainly about economic issues, with more educated rightists having more conservative economic views.

In this poll many less educated Brits of the left and right are in the upper left political quadrant, socially conservative and economically liberal. But there is no strong party representing that position because party leaders are drawn from the college educated, who are in the lower left or upper right quadrant.

Via Tom Harwood on Twitter/X.

Alistair Moffat, "The Sea Peoples: the History of Celtic Britain and Ireland"

Medieval Monastery on Skellig Michael, Ireland

From my old web site:

“This is a history,” Alistair Moffat tells us, “of whispers and forgetfulness, a story of how the memories and understandings of the Celtic peoples of Britain and Ireland almost faded into inconsequence.” Right away Moffat impresses us with the beauty of his language, the power of his love for his homeland, and the imprecision of his thinking. What is a history of forgetfulness, anyway? But it is a lovely phrase and it serves as well as any other to introduce Moffat’s delightful and unusual little book. Not really a history, The Sea Peoples (2002) might be better described as an exploration across time and space. Moffat wanders the Celtic lands of Britain and Ireland, especially Wales, Cornwall, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man, talking to people, describing what he sees, and relating the odd historical anecdote. The historical stories come without concern for chronology, touching on whatever catches Moffat’s interest. We get a little on the pre-Roman Britons and the pagan Irish, a little more on medieval monks, a nice chapter on the arrival of the Vikings and the formation of the half Scottish, half Viking Kingdom of the Isles, and a fair amount on the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The stories are fascinating and Moffat tells them well. I learned much, especially about the revival of the Welsh language in the nineteenth century, based on dissenting chapels and hymn singing, and the history of the Scottish borders. I enjoyed almost every page, and I heartily recommend Moffat’s book.

Moffat occasionally goes in for what strikes me as excessive anti-English ranting, but without ever lying or exaggerating – given how many horrible things the English have done to the Welsh and the Irish, he hardly has to – and he also describes a few of the atrocities the Welsh and Irish have inflicted in return. He dwells in particular on the many ways lowland Scots brutalized their highland countrymen, and King James VI and I is one of the story’s worst villains. Among other sundry oppressions he punished a few rebellious clans by banning their surnames. It became a capital crime to use the name MacGregor, and several MacGregors were executed for the offense of going by their own name. Mainly, though, Moffat celebrates the land and people of Britain’s western shores. He visits a builder of traditional Irish boats, hikes the Welsh mountains while reliving the struggle against Edward I, peruses ancient crosses on the Isle of Man. He goes to Padstow to see the famous ‘Obby ‘Oss, where drunk Cornishmen tell him to get the fuck out of their town. Moffat, not the least daunted, regards this behavior as typically Celtic, and he seems pleased that the Padstow men are determined to keep their ancient festival their own.

Moffat is himself a lowland Scot with roots in the border country, and he makes his living as a producer for Scottish television. By way of a midlife crisis he has thrown himelf into Celtic nationalism, learning Gaelic and producing a series of documentaries about the Celtic lands. The book is, as I said, delightful, but I find this sort of small-country nationalism to be a deeply puzzling thing. Alistair Moffat is a citizen of the world, a resident of multi-cultural metropolis, a master of high technology and contemporary art. What, exactly, is he doing in the Hebrides, mucking around in tweed and learning a language that none of his ancestors spoke? (The Celtic element of border culture was Welsh, not Gaelic, as Moffat himself explains.) Why is he associating himself with a history of defeat and oppression, instead of celebrating the Scottish Enlightenment or the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo? I don’t get it. I realize, though, that many of my fellow humans feel this sort of pull toward a small world that they can claim as their own. So I read books like Moffat’s with interest, and wonder what his obsession means.

What, exactly, is Celtic about the western fringe of Britain? Moffat devotes a lot of attention to language, and learning Gaelic has been part of his personal quest. But, as he explains, Gaelic is dying out, and he believes Irish is not far behind it on the road to extinction. Moffat spends a lot of time in Cornwall and on the Isle of Man, where the ancient languages have no more native speakers and are maintained only by a few hobbyists. Only in Wales, he says, does the native language have real strength. So while Celtic is a linguistic term, it is hard to see how language defines the culture of the region. There is history, to be sure, but what do these regions have in common historically but opposition to, and oppression by, English-speaking lowlanders? Moffat has a go at defining a Celtic view of the world, but the only things he comes up with are a love of heavy drinking, a delight in music, a fondness for flowery oratory, a tolerance for bland food, and greater-than-normal interest in sex. On such things we found our personal identities. Over them we fight wars and stage revolutions.

Everything else Moffat finds to say about “Celtic” culture seems to me to be more about pre-modern, peasant culture than anything particularly Celtic. Take, for example, Moffat’s words on how the Celts measured time:

The Celtic way of reckoning time was very different from our modern method of dividing the year into months, days, and hours. The Celtic year was arranged around four quarter-day festivals which took their cue not from the date on the calendar, but from the weather, the landscape and the behavior of animals. (31) 

Which is pretty much the way everyone in pre-modern Europe reckoned time. All Moffat says about how much the Celts love the landscape of their homes, how strongly they have clung to their tiny farms in the face of huge pressure to leave, how deeply they distrust city-based power, and so on, applies equally well to peasants just about everywhere else in the world. I often observe this about nationalists of various kinds. When pressed to name the special characteristics of their homelands, they can do no better than to describe humanity. Small country nationalism is an assertion of difference. I am not like everyone else, says the proud Welshman, Breton, Basque, or Quebecois. But the differences they point to strike me as insignificant, especially compared to the gulf that separates a modern man like Moffat from any of his ancestors born before 1850. In what sense is Alistair Moffat more like Owen Glendower than he is like me?

I think the interest of modern metropolitans in the rural nations of their ancestors grows out of dissatisfaction with the lives we live. Even for successful TV producers, the planet-wide sameness of modern society, the sterility of air-conditioned towers that separate us from the soil and the weather, and the pointlessness of so much that we do batter our souls and full us with emptiness. We are safe from disease and hunger, even tooth pain, but instead of contentment we feel loss. Surrounded by people, we feel alone. We have trouble feeling that any of the greatness around us is our own. We are strangers in the metropolis and our most pressing question is, who am I? The response of many people is to turn their backs on the broader world and immerse themselves in something small. The very smallness of these identities, their hopelessness backwardness, their legacies of defeats and conquests, makes them beacons of meaning in a world that values only celebrity and success. I am a Celt, Alistiar Moffat says to the mirror, and this answer gives him a place to stand amidst the whirl of post-industrial civilization. It is not place I can belong to, or much want to belong to, but his marvelous book gives an outsider some idea of why so many people place their hearts in this quasi-imaginary land.

October 24, 2009 

Orkney

I've just finished a long, moderately interesting book about Orkney, and now my thoughts take me to those islands where Britain ends and the North Sea meets the Atlantic.

Kirkwall, with the Cathedral of St. Magnus.

I almost went there, when I was in Britain, but my now wife and I decided on Paris instead. Glad I've seen Paris but hope I get to Orkney some day.

This 1654 map is good enough to show you the basic layout: Mainland is the big island in the middle, with the North Islands to the north and the South Islands to the south. The harbor of Scapa Flow is between Mainland and the South Islands.

For reasons I have never understood, Orkney has an amazing collection of Neolithic monuments. This is the famous buried village of Skara Brae.

Stone Circle known as the Ring of Brodgar.

Maeshowe. The medieval Saga of the Earls of Orkney tells how Vikings broke into the mound but found that it had already been looted long before. They left graffiti inside.

Medieval church of St. Magnus, Eglisay.

Amazing photograph showing the local farmhouse type, which is of Norse origin.

Some of the local sheep, which have adapted to eat a lot of seaweed.

Windfarm. Orkney is thriving right now, partly because electricity is cheaper there than anywhere else in Britain. There are lots of windfarms, there is tidal power, and there are not enough powerlines to get that energy to places that need it. Bad planning but nice for Orcadians.

Below, two lovely photographs by Ben Pentreath.

The Witches of Orkney

I have been studying the European witchcraft persecutions for more than 40 years, and I have never read anything on the subject more enlightening than one amazing chapter of Peter Marshall's Storm's Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney (2024). This vast book is a detailed (sometimes too detailed) history of Orkney from 1468, when it passed from the Kingdom of Norway to the Kingdom of Scotland as part of a marriage settlement, to the early 1800s. Marshall is deeply learned in the history, language, folklore, geography and documents of Orkney, and his broad expertise is part of what makes his treatment of witch cases so compelling. I highly recommend this 48-page chapter.

I want to dwell here on two particular cases. There is an idea out there that there "were no witches," that is, that the people burned at the stake were just unfortunates caught up in a malignant system. There is a monument in Kirkwall today on the spot where many witches were strangled and burned, and it bears the words "They were cheust folk": they were just people. However, this was not always true. Yes, when the big panics got going and accused witches were tortured until they named their accomplices, anyone could be condemned. But so far as we can tell, most accused witches were people widely reputed to have magical powers, and some of them absolutely did try to harm their neighbors with black magic.

The magic of Orkney, like everything else about the islands, was drawn in part from their Norse past. During the period of the persecution, the 1500s and 1600s, English and Scots were gradually replacing Orkney's old Norse dialect, but the magical formulas that come down to us were mostly in Norn. The witches often spoke of "going with the good wights." The word "wights" is usually rendered into modern English as "fairies," and of course the grim ministers of the Reformation Kirk translated it "demons." But it seems to denote a unique class of beings more like Norse trolls than British fairies. Marshall believes that people "went with" the wights in dreams or trance, and we do have some accounts of meeting them in dreams, but I suspect people thought they could be met in the physical world as well.

This brings us to Oliver Leask, a man who was condemned in 1616 after what looks like a very long career as a healer, enchanter, thief, extortionist, and expert on the spirit world:

Leask's modus operandi involved travelling around, begging money, food, and drink, and making veiled threats when his requests were denied. That he continued in this manner for so long suggests a reluctance to tangle with those thought to possess magical powers. Not everyone complied. During 'bere seed time', Leask  came to John Craigie's farm at Swandale, on the east side of Rousay, 'boasterously' demanding grain. When Craigie refused, bitter words ensued, and Least got a blow from 'the shaft of the Clodmell' – a large mallet for greaking up clods of earth. Since that time, Craigie had found 'ane great number of his horses and beasts all dead.' (192)

One woman responded to Leask's threats by saying, 'If God be with me, what can ye do to me?' Leask answered that he could harm her whether God was with her or not. Leask was also a healer, and one of the charges against him concerned a time when he heard that a wealthy man was sick and travelled a long distance to offer his services as magical physician. Leask was found guilty of witchcraft, but the jury also declared that he was insane, so he avoided the death penalty. Which raises another interesting question: was Leask crazy? If so, what was the relationship between his mental illness and his career as a sorceror? Consider the way he lived, homeless, wandering the islands begging for his keep while believing that he had great magical powers: does that not seem a bit mad? There is a strong association between shamanism and lunacy in many cultures, so it would not be surprising if it existed in 17th-century Orkney

Leask sometimes used an alias, 'Walliman.' This was no ordinary name, but an old word for sorceror likely derived from the Norse völva. Sort of like calling yourself 'Warlock.' And this brings us to our next case, which I find even more interesting. Jonet Rendall was condemned in 1629 for a long bill of charges stretching back 20 years, the most damning of which was regularly consorting with the devil:

Her acquaintance with the Devil began two decades earlier, 'above the hill of Rendall' – somewhere along the windy ridge joining the summits of Hackland, Enyas and Gorseness Hills. . . Satan arrived at a vulnerable moment: Jonet had 'sought charity and could not have it'. He made her an offer, and though the dittay [bill of charges] uses the theological language of a 'pact', the Devil does not seem to have demanded anything in return. He promised to 'learn you to win alms by healing of folk, and whosoever should give you alms should be the better either by land or sea. And those that gave you no alms should not be healed . . . whatever you craved to befall them should befall." Despite this promise of vengeance on the mean-fisted, Satan, it appears, wanted to make Jonet Rendall into a magical healer.

It was, however, the prosecutor who identifiedthe mysterious figure 'clad in white clothes, with ane white head and ane grey beard' as the Devil. Jonet had her own name for him: Walliman. It seems very likely that her life-changing encounter was with a human not a supernatural being: the showman-warlock Oliver Leask, whose professional technique was precisely as described in the offer to Jonet, and who frequented this part of Orkney in the first decade of the seventeenth century. (199)

If Marshall is right, this case is a very important one, because one of the things we know the least about such cunning folk is how they learned their trades. 

It also looks to me like Jonet Rendall shared something else with Leask, a weak grasp on sanity:

If Jonet Rendall learned her secrets of curing and cursing from Oliver Leask, their last meeting must have been prior to Leask's banishment in the spring of 1616. In the succeeding years, he evidently assumed in her mind a more than human status. Jonet's confession spoke of 'praying to Walliman', and in admitting nearly all the charges she emphasised his power rather than hers: 'Walliman took away the profit of the ky'; 'Walliman slew the mares.' (200)

One of the charges against Jonet raises other important themes:

In 1621, Andro Matches of Sundiehous in Hackland Denounced Joney to the sheriff after losing the profit of his milk. Nine months later, he took complaint to the Evie Kirk Session. Matches was clearly unusual in his willingness to cause trouble for Jonet; a few days later, she remonstrated with him for 'always dealing with and complaining' of her, and said he would repent it.

Sure enough, three days later, Andro went out of his wits. His wife's reaction may seem curious to us, but is one commonly met with both in Orkney and elsewhere: she sent for the woman she believed to have cursed her husband. As soon as Jonet arrived, Andro began to feel better, and Jonet was rewarded with a plate of meat. Before tasting it, she spat three times over her left shoulder, and Andro's wife, 'fearing ye had been doing more evil,' spring forward to strike her. 'Let me alone,' Joney snapped, 'for your goodman will be well.'

The image of Andro's anxious wife, unsure if she was witnessing a ritual of healing or harming, captures the uneasy relationship between those who knew how to work magic and those who were eager to benefit from its effects. People in the farms of the West Mainland put up with Jonet's presence because she offered useful services and because they were afraid of her.

I believe that Europe was full of such characters throughout the medieval and early modern periods, and quite likely going much farther back in time. But we can know few of them in the wonderful way Peter Marshall helps us to know Oliver Leask and Jonet Rendall.

The Italian Chapel

After the medieval cathedral in Kirkwall, the most visited religious site in the Orkneys is probably a small metal church on the uninhabited island of Lamb Holm. This little place was built in 1942-1945 by Italian prisoners of war.

One of the Royal Navy's main anchorages during both World Wars was Scapa Flow, a huge natural harbor in the Orkneys north of Scotland. The British thought they had closed all the subsidiary entrances to the harbor using sunken ships and other barriers. But on the night of October 14, 1939, a daring U-Boat captain named Günther Prien steered his vessel through the barriers and sank the battleship Royal Oak as it rode at anchor. Among the 835 men killed were so many teenage boys that the Admiralty was obliged by Parliamentary pressure to limit the number of such youngsters deployed on warships at sea. 

Then First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill ordered the construction of an elaborate system of causeways and obstacles that were called the Churchill Barriers.

Among the more than 2,000 men who labored on the barriers were 550 Italians who had been captured in North Africa. Sometime during 1943 their priest convinced the British commandant of their camp that these men needed a place of worship.

Wikipedia:

The chapel was constructed from limited materials by the prisoners in the form of a tin tabernacle, and comprises two Nissen huts [Quonset huts to Americans] joined end-to-end. The corrugated interior was then covered with plasterboard and the altar and altar rail were constructed from concrete left over from work on the barriers. Most of the interior decoration was done by Domenico Chiocchetti, a prisoner from Moena in Trentino, northern Italy. He painted the sanctuary end of the chapel and fellow prisoners decorated the entire interior. They created a facade out of concrete, concealing the shape of the hut and making the building look like a church. The light holders were made out of corned beef tins. The baptismal font was made from the inside of a car exhaust covered in a layer of concrete.

Funny that a bunch of male POWs thougt they needed a baptismal font; I guess it was in their minds an essential part of any church.

The church was still unfinished at the end of the war, but some of the Italians returned to complete the job; others participated in the restorations of the 1960s and 1990s. If you are wondering why the British were so accomodating to these former POWs, it is the same in the US; there are several old buildings on US military bases that are considered historic because they once housed Italian POWs, and I have been told that for old soldiers to return, often with their families, was routine into the 1990s. The switch of Italy from enemy to key NATO ally – without the Nazi stain that hung over the Germans – changed those men into comrades, and much was done to make their returns pleasant.

What a remarkable thing to stand on this tiny island, a monument to human resilience, faith, and the peace that some enemies are able to make with each other.

The Sunken Lands of Cardigan Bay

Er Lannic, Brittany

One of my favorite types of myth concerns lost kingdoms drowned under the waves. Not only are these stories cool, they raise in a stark way one of the best questions about myth: to what extent is it a kind of history?

Humans lived through one of the great land-drownings in earth's history, the 100 meter (330 feet) sea-level rise at the end of the last Ice Age. This was not, in the grand scheme of things, so long ago; in my part of the world the Chesapeake Bay was just a river valley until around 8,200 BC. Doggerland, a lost chain of islands in the North Sea, may have drowned around the same time. The Black Sea does not seem to have been joined to the Mediterranean until about 5600 BC, and some people think that event was accompanied by catastrophic flooding. Most glacial melting was complete by 5000 BC, but in some areas there has been more localized sea level rise even more recently. It seems plausible to me that these events were remembered.

Which brings me to the west coast of Wales, and Cardigan Bay in particular. The Celts had multiple stories about drowned cities, provinces, and kingdoms. The most famous concern Ker Ys in Brittany, but Cardigan Bay has its own cluster of legends.

Consider this excerpt of a medieval map of Britain. Called the Gough Map, it was made sometime between 1300 and 1350. It is quite good as medieval maps go; all of the hundreds of towns and rivers it names actually existed. So why does it show two substantial islands in Cardigan Bay?

Wikipedia has a good summary of the main local legend, under the heading Cantre'r Gawelod:  

Cantre'r Gwaelod, also known as Cantref Gwaelod or Cantref y Gwaelod (Welsh for 'The Lowland Hundred'), is a legendary ancient sunken kingdom said to have occupied a tract of fertile land lying between Ramsey Island and Bardsey Island in what is now Cardigan Bay to the west of Wales. It has been described as a "Welsh Atlantis" and has featured in folklore, literature, and song.

There are several versions of the myth. The earliest known form of the legend is usually said to appear in the Black Book of Carmarthen, in which the land is referred to as Maes Gwyddno (Welsh for 'the Plain of Gwyddno'). In this version, the land was lost to floods when a well-maiden named Mererid neglected her duties and allowed the well to overflow.

The popular version known today is thought to have been formed from the 17th century onwards. Cantre'r Gwaelod is described as a low-lying land fortified against the sea by a dyke, Sarn Badrig ("Saint Patrick's causeway"), with a series of sluice gates that were opened at low tide to drain the land.

Cantre'r Gwaelod's capital was Caer Wyddno, seat of the ruler Gwyddno Garanhir. Two princes of the realm held charge over the dyke. One of these princes, called Seithenyn, is described in one version as a notorious drunkard and carouser, and it was through his negligence that the sea swept through the open floodgates, ruining the land.

My favorite detail is that the church bells of Cantre'r Gwaelod were said to ring out when enemies or storms are approaching, warning people on shore of danger.

What really makes these stories compelling is the physical evidence one can find all around Cardigan Bay. There is quite a bit of shallow water in the bay, as this chart of the northern half shows.

There is also physical evidence one might interpret as the remnants of sunken lands. First, there are a lot of rocks. There are what look like rock piles in water shallow enough that the rocks are visible when the tide is low and the water clear, and two places where they are exposed at low tide (above). Many older sources, such as the 1846 Topographical Dictionary of Wales, describe these rock piles as the remnants of sunken cities or castles:

In the sea, about seven miles west of Aberystwyth in Cardiganshire, is a collection of loose stones, termed Caer Wyddno, "the fort or palace of Gwyddno;" and adjoining it are vestiges of one of the more southern causeways or embankments of Catrev Gwaelod. The depth of water over the whole extent of the bay of Cardigan is not great; and on the recess of the tide, stones bearing Latin inscriptions, and Roman coins of various emperors, have been found below high-water mark: in different places in the water, also, are observed prostrate trees.

And there are these linear rock features, known as Sarnau, which run hundreds of meters out into the sea. Modern geologists say they are just unusual glacial deposits, but you can see why medieval people thought they might be ancient causeways leading to now vanished islands. 

The "Submerged Forest of Ynyslas"

But what has gotten a lot of attention in recent years is the sunken trees. Starting around 2010, a series of storms, culminating in the hurricane of 2019, have exposed the remains of what people call "the submerged forest at Ynyslas." This was a temperate forest, with oak, pine, birch, willow and hazel trees. Radiocarbon dating places its drowning around 4000 to 5000 years ago. 

So far as I can tell, there is no agreement about whether there might have been solid land in Cardigan Bay in 1300. But there are scholarly articles arguing that there was. If so, it would have been quite low-lying, and notice that the Gough Map does not show any village on the islands. So if there was land, it was presumably marshy and used mainly for grazing cattle.

So many stories in the world, so much history, so much to occupy my mind.