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Last month I might have frightened you away from visiting Cornwall, and damaged the local tourist industry in the process. So to maintain a balance, and hopefully encourage you to come to this beautiful county, here’s the story of Cornwall’s very own Atlantis.
Introduction
According to The Saxon Chronicle Lyonesse was obliterated on the 11th November 1099. The chronicle tells of the sea inundating the land and drowning towns, people, and animals. However, that date may be misleading as there are other references to a date of 1089, or even sometime during the 6th Century. But, whatever the date, the myth of a lost land persists, so it might well be a folk memory of dry land that did exist at some point. And geological evidence shows that sea levels were different within human memory.
Today,
legend has it that the Isles of Scilly are all that remain of Lyonesse, with the islands having been recorded, during the reign of Maximus in the 4th Century, as one single island. 
Lyonesse is said to have contained one hundred and forty villages and churches, and local tradition has it that fishermen still find parts of old buildings in their trawling nets. Some even say they’ve heard the church bells ring
when the sea has been stormy. There is a report that an ex-mayor of Wilton, while standing on the cliffs at Land's End, had
twice seen domes, towers, spires, and fortifications beneath the sea. And, as recently as the 1930s, a News Chronicle journalist claimed to have been woken by the sound of muffled bells ringing one night. His hosts maintained that he had heard the bells of Lyonesse.
The
Seven Stone Rocks are held to be the remains of a city that Fishermen call The
Town, while in Mount’s Bay the remains of a sunken forest can be seen
at low tide. Lending weight to this belief is the fact that St. Michael’s
Mount, situated in Mount’s Bay itself, is the oldCornish name meaning " the hoar rock in the wood." Added to this is the locally held idea
that the Isles of Scilly are the old hilltops of Lyonesse. And it is a fact
that the remains of many ancient stone buildings, including megalithic structures,
can be seen below the high-tide mark.
Today,
there are roughly fifty islands within the Isles of Scilly group, although only four
are inhabited, and have been inhabited since prehistoric times. They have also
been identified as the famous Tin Islands that were known to the Greeks. Geologically they are
made from granite that is very similar to the granite of Cornwall.
History
The
following link will give you a short history of the Isles of Scilly from 1180
up to 1831:
http://69.1911encyclopedia.org/S/SC/SCIENCE.htm
And this
site will tell you a little about the underwater megalithic remains to be found
on the islands:
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/
Here
you can read a brief outline of the possible Phoenician influence on the Island of
Tresco:
http://www.tresco.co.uk/
In
an article about Wolves and War mention is made of the Isles of
Scilly and Lyonesse. Wolf Rock lies in deep and treacherous water, about half way between Land's End and the Isles of Scilly. It relates how the Wolf Rock
came to be named, and details the history of the lighthouse that now stands guard
over this part of the Atlantic. Intriguingly this is one of the few lighthouses
to be built directly on the sea floor:
http://www.wolfsongalaska.org/wolvesinwar2.html
Archaeology
In an archaeological model of the Isles of Scilly published by Professor Charles Thomas he states:
While the Islands have been separated from mainland Britain for many thousands of years, the depth of water between them is so shallow that
Bryher,
Tresco and
Samson are still joined at low astronomical tides (LAT) and a fall of only 10 metres would unite them all, except St. Agnes and the Western Rocks. Scilly, therefore, represents a drowned landscape illustrated by the existence of causeways linking the Islands, submerged stone field boundaries and other archaeological sites within the inter-tidal zone of shallow interior sea.
And Dr. B. P. Horton, from Durham University, thinks that:
The origin of the legend of Lyonesse must, to a certain extent, stem from ancient folk-memories of the Neolithic inundations of areas around the Cornish coast, particularly Mount’s Bay, but more especially from the history of the Isles of Scilly themselves.
You can
read more about it at this link, where the author notes that the legend
of Lyonesse is similar to that of the Breton story about the drowning of Caer
Ys, also known as Ker-Is, in which a king escaped the flood:
http://members.lycos.co.uk/landsendparty/legend_of_lyonesse.htm
There is
a fascinating article, at this next site, that takes a close look at ancient catastrophes
and those who survived them. It examines the possibility of devastating comet
impacts in the ancient past, and gives an alternative history of archaeology
and civilization. Here is just one quote from site:
Did the final inundation of the legandary land of Lyonesse - between the ancient celtic land of Kernow (now Cornwall) and the Isles of Scilly (some 30 miles to the south west of Land's End?) - happen in the mid-sixth century AD? And were the inundations off the western coast of Wales that occurred around the same time just a small part of a much larger catastrophe that affected not just the coastal lands on the so-called Celtic Shelf of northwest Europe, but other areas of the world as well?
http://www.morien-institute.org/survivors.html
The site also has this map, with text that reads:
a map of global sea levels showing coastlines circa 17,000 B.P. with submerged lands shown in green.
From
another part of the same site, the author suggests that Plato’s Atlantis disappeared in 9,600 B.C., around the time that the last Ice Age ended, and that memories of sunken lands are passed down in oral traditions across the world. To again take a quote from the site:
In his "Atlantis: New Hypothesis", Viatcheslav Koudriavstev provides a link to a map of the Little Sole Bank on the Celtic Shelf. In his accompanying analysis of this map he concludes: "Some paleogeographic reconstructions of Western Europe at the (end) of the last glaciation suggest that there had existed a river originating in the area of the modern Irish Sea, which must have flown into the ocean in approximately this area. And if this is indeed the trace of the ancient river-bed, then the present Little Sole Bank was not an island or merely a hill on the shore, but a hill at the river-mouth, which is a uniquely beneficial position for a city."
This is very interesting, because mentioned in "Branwen, Daughter of Llyr", the second branch of the collection of Welsh folk tales known as "The Mabynogion", in the edition prepared from the 'middle Welsh' by Sir Ifor Williams (Gwasg Dinefwr, Llandybie, Dyfed 1930) there are two rivers described as running between Wales and Ireland.
http://www.morien-institute.org/uwnews1997.html
Geology
In
the middle of 1998 Russian scientists were investigating the area below sea level just beyond the Isles of Scilly, known as the Celtic Shelf. They were hoping
to find the legendary land of Atlantis. This is not quite so crazy as it sounds,
and in a book called The Atlantis of the West, by Paul Dunbavin, he makes a very good case for the British Isles to have been Plato’s Atlantis.
In February this year, 2004, the BBC reported that scientists
from the University of Birmingham had used computer imagery to map a prehistoric 10,000 year old plain that is now submerged beneath the North Sea. Hunters,
animals, and plants would have inhabited the area. You can read more about the discovery here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/
And you can read the original press release from the University here:
http://www.newscentre.bham.ac.uk/
It
is also interesting to read what the following link says about the geology, just after the end of the last Ice Age, and the various flood myths from around the world:
http://www.comparative-religion.com/articles/torah_torah_torah/torah5.php
Asteroid Impact
In an article
by Andrew Rothovius, written just after we saw the 
Shoemaker Levy comet smash
into Jupiter, he examines the idea of a comet impact on Earth around 534 A.D.
There is evidence, supported by the dendrochronology data, that something occurred
around this time to cause abnormally low temperatures that lasted for about
fifteen to twenty years in the Northern Hemisphere.
He
suggests that the impact might have been a fragment of Halley’s Comet, which would have been seen in September 530 A.D. He also makes reference to
the:
Celtic traditions of the submergence of three large coastal areas in Cornwall, Wales and Brittany.
Within this time-frame it appears that not only Lyonesse was sunk, but also theLost Land of Cantref in Cardigan Bay,
Wales, and the lost city of Ys, which Breton legend says sank beneath theBay
of Douarnenez. During the same time-frame there were also many other catastrophes
that befell various parts of the world, including earthquakes, plagues, and
tsunamis.
However,
the contemporary historical sources of Gildas, and Nennius, don’t mention
any such flooding event. And during the conquest of Anglesey, undertaken by
Suetonius, the author Tacitus notes that the Romans had to cross the Menai Straits
to reach the island.
Old Maps
It would appear that in Roman times the Isles of Scilly were still a single island. There are old maps from the period, and before, which seem to substantiate this fact. Nigel Pennick wrote a book entitled Lost Lands and Sunken Cities in which he states in his introduction:
Apart from the more-or-less legendary lost lands like Lyonesse, which is said to have existed between Cornwall and the Scillies, large tracts of coastal land have vanished from mainland Britain over the last two thousand years.
In
the following article many of these ancient maps are discussed, and the findings
are indeed intriguing:
http://www.celticgrounds.com/chapters/encyclopedia/l.html
Plato
In
Andrew Collins’s article, entitled Atlantis in Northern Europe, he examines why this part of Europe should be linked to Plato’s Atlantis.
He begins by referencing an 1876 book, entitled The Oera Linda Book, that was ostensibly a translation of a 13th Century ancient Frisian text. It
told of an old land known as Atland, or Aldland, that supposedly was to be found
in the North Sea between Denmark and Shetland. This ancient land was said to
have been destroyed by floods and upheaval in 2,193 B.C. However, the book was
never given credence by serious academics, and it was dismissed as pure hoax.
You can read the rest of the article here:
http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/interactive/northeur.htm
Trevelyan
There
is a persistent legend that a man who escaped the inundation o fLyonesse, on
his white horse, founded the Cornish family of Trevelyan; who’s family
crest still shows a white horse. He out-rode the flood until he reached the higher ground of Perranuthnoe, now on the south coast of Cornwall.
Fanciful
as that sounds, there are also reports of similar events happening during the
1953 and 1978 flood disasters in East Anglia. You can read more about the Trevelyan legend
here:
http://www.britannia.com/history/legend/cornish/cornss04.html
And you can also read about Trevelyan at this site, which also mentions the archaeological remains to be seen around the islands:
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/4641
King Arthur
Of
course it isn’t possible to write about Lyonesse without mentioning its relevance to the Arthurian legends, and especially the story of Tristan. But my purpose here is to look at the real evidence for the existence of this sunken land. However, if you’d like to read about the Arthurian ideas then the following links will give you most of the information. The first link gives information about the oral tradition, and writing, from which it comes:
http://www.timelessmyths.com/celtic/armorican.html
http://www.kingarthursknights.com/theland/lyonesse.asp
http://www.time-scapes.co.uk/
http://www.occultopedia.com/l/lyonesse.htm
http://www.geocities.com/pastorkeith/fantastic.html
http://www.earlybritishkingdoms.com/bios/tristram.html
http://classiclit.about.com/
Ritual Landscapes & Ley Lines
Another
very interesting aspect of Lyonesse is its relevance to the famous 
St. Michael
Ley Line that runs from St. Michael’s Mount, off the coast of Penzance in Cornwall, to the coast near Bury St. Edmunds in East Anglia. John Michel,
in his book entitledThe Sun and The Serpent, proposes that the
line actually starts fromMont St. Michel, just off the coast of France. All along this particular Ley Line can be found many of Britain’s megalithic
monuments.
And
this link from the Daily Grail web site explains much about geomancy and ritual landscapes, including Ley Lines; which are also known as Dragon Paths:
http://www.dailygrail.com/blog/3958
The article
at this next link discusses the apparent worldwide feelings of "something"
not being right with the natural world around us, and the fact that a Dimensional
Shift appears to be on the horizon. But the main bulk of the piece is devoted
to Crop Circles; asking what they are, and how they might be made in conjunction
with UFOs, plus some of the strange phenomena experienced whist standing inside
them.
The really interesting part is the relationship they may have with Ley Lines, especially the Michael/Mary Ley Line which, as previously stated, is one of
the most powerful to be found anywhere in the world, and which might even be
a part of a global Ley Line that once passed through Lyonesse.
Here’s
just one quote from the article:
This sudden reanimation makes me wonder if the Crop Circle Makers have been 'feeding' the energies in preparation for Cosmic events that will affect us here. In Ancient cultures, how to awaken this female serpent was the key, for when this Goddess ground energy failed to appear, the Old King civilisation would have to die and a new 'Snake Charmer' was called in, lest the land and her people went to waste.
It appears
to have been written just prior to the millennial change of 2000, and it covers
many New Age topics from the Druids, the End of the Mayan Long Count, and the
Fisher King, to an E.T. group called the Umer, (that are supposedly from star number 20 in the Pleiades), and the need for the reintroduction of the Feminine
Principle:
www.greatdreams.com/anover.htm
If
you’d like to read more about Ley Lines there is a very good book entitled Ley Lines – A Comprehensive Guide to Alignments written
by Danny Sullivan.
UFOs
At
the forum of the alien-ufos.com web site there is a thread that
talks of Lyonesse. However, it also covers some other very intriguing topics
including underwater bases off the Cornish coast, "Wurst" shaped
UFO sightings, natiform tazza sightings between 1958 and 1960, and the strange
sinking of the Trewlany in 1946. But unfortunately, doing my usual Googling,
I haven’t been able to turn up any further references to these.
http://www.alien-ufos.com/forum/showthread.php?p=66811#post66811
Our ancient
ancestors were very much like us, so why are their myths and legends continually dismissed as being just that? If you study them closely it’s clear that
they are describing real events, but they were only able to do so in the words
and concepts that they understood. In choosing to read them only from our modern-day perspective perhaps we dismiss them at our peril!