23 ms·

Lost islands cited in Welsh folklore and poetry are plausible

167 points by docmechanic 4y ago

docmechanic 4y ago
New study of coastal geography and a medieval map.
gus_massa 4y ago
I hate when the articles have no images, so here are a few: Wikipedia page about the legend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantre%27r_Gwaelod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantre%27r_Gwaelod The PDF of the research article is in https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/ag/article/view/32596/1882528188 https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/ag/article/view/32596/... (https://doi.org/10.4138/atlgeo.2022.005 https://doi.org/10.4138/atlgeo.2022.005) The old map with the islands is in page 5 and a new map with the sea depth is in page 7.
- docmechanic 4y ago
  Thank you! Surely there is a Welsh writer of science fiction or fantasy that can make good use of this knowledge ...
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    Is this a reference to Susan Cooper?
    - galangalalgol 4y ago
      That was my first thought on seeing the headline as well.
    - docmechanic 4y ago
      No, but she's exactly the sort of writer that I was thinking of.
- tpmx 4y ago
  Wikipedia: > Legends of the land suggest that it may have extended 20 miles west of the present coast. Any idea of how large these lands were, area-wise?
  - gus_massa 4y ago
    From the research article: > The dimensions of the offshore islands may be estimated in proportion to these respective two sets of measurements, so that the southern island measures approximately 6.6 × 3.8 km (ca. 19.7 km^2) and the northern island 10.7 × 5.8 km (ca. 48.7 km^2), and that the islands lie ca. 3.5–4.0 km from the mainland shore. However, these measurements must be viewed with extreme caution given the poor areal accuracy of the Gough Map. Later in the article they estimate that the sea erosion was 5-10m/y and the alleged islands disappeared in 5 approximately centuries, so a width of 5km is consistent.
- lumost 4y ago
  It does make you wonder if the legend of atlantis is simply due to a myriad of ancient civilizations that vanished under rising oceans. Given human population centers cluster around ocean ports/rivers with easy access to fresh drinking water. It seems entirely plausible that estimates of human population size at the end of the last ice age may be substantially off.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    There is no "legend" of Atlantis, it's simply an allegory in Plato's works. To the best of our knowledge, no one in the ancient world believed that Atlantis had existed, any more than we believe today that Hogwarts was a real place.
    - cvoss 4y ago
      How does one discern whether a story is a history or a fiction, thousands of years afterward? Language and culture shift dramatically in that time. (Actual question, not rhetorical.) If Plato is the only one who recounts the story, that doesn't show he invented it. Stories of actual events are lost all the time. Why would it be surprising to hear a story about a thing from only one remaining and preserved source?
      - astine 4y ago
        You can tell by actually reading the account and knowing a little bit about the context. Plato's account is of a civilization that was defeated in a war with Athens ten thousand years before his time. Because Athens did not exist ten thousand years before Plato (something we can confirm through archeology) we know that Plato's account can't be true. Given that the point of the story is to demonstrate the importance of Athens, (according to the character Critias, Athens is so important that people in Egypt are still relating this story of something that happened thousands of years ago,) it's definitely a fiction. Plato's dialogues were works of fiction that used fictionalized versions of real people as characters in order to illustrate philosophical points. The guy who relates the story of Atlantis is Critias, one of the members of the Thirty Tyrants, a clique who ruled Athens for a while, and Critias claims that he got the story from his distant ancestor Solon who was one of the lawgivers for Athens. To a contemporary of Plato's this would be as if he'd written a story about George Bush, relating a story that he'd gotten originally from George Washington, about how the United States had once fought a war against a long-lost evil empire back in the bronze-age. You weren't supposed to think it was true.
balentio 4y ago
Wasn't this posted to Hacker News before?
- gus_massa 4y ago
  I only could find this from another URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32542953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32542953 (2 points | 12 days ago | 0 comments) Note that from the FAQ: > Are reposts ok? If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates. I sometimes link old post with low points or few comments when one of the comments is very interesting and explain or debunk the post. But in this case there is nothing interesting in the old discussion. (Is the other URL better? Both look similar to me.)
jbverschoor 4y ago
Why do people always think that things from the past are simply not real. “They”(us in the future) could say the exact same thing about all the things that are real in our current lives. All these mythical creatures (soon to be extinct) Having such a surplus of fresh water. At a certain point they will just deny Dubai was created
- nelblu 4y ago
  It is human nature to glorify the past and romanticize the greatness of "those days". There is nothing wrong in maintaining a healthy skeptical mind towards outrageous claims. Further the onus of proof lies on the person making the claim.
- fritztastic 4y ago
  > At a certain point they will just deny Dubai was created That reminds me of a (reportedly fake) quote attributed to Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum: “My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson is going to ride a Land Rover, but my great-grandson is going to have to ride a camel again.”
- simonh 4y ago
  There are plenty of things from the past that are absolutely real. We have tons of physical evidence for settlements all over the world throughout history. I’m sure there’s more yet to be discovered. But until we discover it, it’s just hearsay. There may well have been a real place that inspired Plato’s mention if Atlantis, but only one. Not the many hundreds of possible locations suggested over the centuries. They can’t all be Atlantis, if any of them are.
  - ecolonsmak 4y ago
    200yrs from now well meaning discussion will consider if the long extinct elephant was in fact mythical
    - simonh 4y ago
fritztastic 4y ago
It's always interesting (for me) to learn of lost lands- from before humans were around, too, but especially those mentioned in human stories. There are many of these [1]- some of which are the subject of fascinating and informative documentaries, such as this one about Doggerland [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_lands?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_lands?wprov=sfla1 [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DECwfQQqRzo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DECwfQQqRzo
sveme 4y ago
Pretty similar to the story of Rungholt[1], which is clearly no longer myth, but fact, with lots of remnants being found. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rungholt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rungholt
paganel 4y ago
> Evidence from the Roman cartographer Ptolemy suggests the coastline 2000 years ago may have been some 13 km further out to sea than it is today. This sort of stuff doesn't get repeated often enough in this day and age, we live with the illusion that the sea levels as we now have them should remain the same over the next centuries no matter what.
- 988747 4y ago
  It does not get repeated because it would suggest that sea level changes are natural, as opposed to being caused by industrial CO2 emissions, and limiting CO2 emissions is a huge business right now.
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    I imagine that most people haven’t thrown gasoline on a fire. Surely they can’t understand making something bad way more worse than it was.
  - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
    >It does not get repeated because it would suggest that sea level changes are natural Sea level changes are absolutely natural and have fluctuated wildly over the history of the planet. The sea level was 360 feet lower 13,000 years ago. Certainly human activity has a measurable effect on the environment but it is simply absurd to pretend that our environment (including sea levels) isn't in a constant state of flux.
    - Ma8ee 4y ago
      The problem now is that the change is some orders of magnitude faster than they used to be.
      - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
        That isn't true at all. The history of the planet is marked by rapid, repeated changes in the climate. The climate is going to change - drastically - just like it has for the entire history of the earth. We should understand that our activity has an influence but it is not the only factor or the dominant one. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ContentFeature/GlobalWarming/images/epica_temperature.png https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ContentFeature/GlobalWarmi...
theknocker 4y ago
galgot 4y ago
Could it be that the Ys city legend in Brittany was this Welsh legend transposed in Brittany, when the Bretons (originally Welsh peoples) migrated there... very interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ys
- Nursie 4y ago
  And don't forget Lyonesse, a Cornish lost land, with related language and people - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyonesse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyonesse
tombh 4y ago
I grew up in this part of the world! Quite a strange juxtaposition seeing my home on the front page of this site. So maybe I can offer some lesser known interesting context: Wales is only some 300km west of London, yet I have childhood memories (some 35 years ago) of needing to try to speak Welsh to my elderly (in his 80s) neighbour who struggled with English. There is a theory that English's use of "do" (so-called "Do-support") comes from the Welsh language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-support#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-support#Origins The stones for Stonehenge come from the Preseli mountains, a small range of blue-ish hills exactly on the coast where these lost islands are proposed. There is a Welsh settlement in Argentina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Wladfa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Wladfa Not strictly Welsh, but the Severn Estuary, which is the calm, funnel of sea between Wales and England, that invites ships into the harbour of Bristol, points exactly towards Newfoundland in North America. This Welsh-English estuary is where John Cabot made the second recorded voyage of a modern European to the New World[1]. Nowadays, we think of Airports as being the doorways to whole new worlds, but there was a time when it was the coastline and harbours of the South West British Isles that rang and echoed with the adventures, legends, captains, pirates, spices, gems and foreigners of unimaginable far away lands. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot#Second_voyage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot#Second_voyage
- r3trohack3r 4y ago
  > Nowadays, we think of Airports as being the doorways to whole new worlds I have a habit of parking on the top floors of parking garages for the views. A few months back, I was parked on the top floor of PHX at night waiting to pick up a friend. I sat and watched the planes depart and arrive for 45 minutes or so. From my angle, they were quite small and I was able to take in several runways of activity simultaneously. Looking to the left there were constellations of aircraft lining up to approach the runways. The scale of "Sky Harbor" was lost on me until that moment, watching these aircraft come to port. Some passenger planes, some cargo, all connecting distant lands. It felt like watching a shipyard. And then I realized the awe I felt at the progress of humanity was probably on-par with someone standing in a shipyard circa 1650. And the relative antiquity we feel towards them in 1650 will be felt towards us in 2300. What they had wasn't any more antiquity than what I have - we both sit at the pinnacle of human civilization so far staring forward into the potential. Not sure where this ramble is going - but thank you for sharing your story and throwing me back to that moment.
UberFly 4y ago
The article says the research was based on the Gough Map. Just look at this thing. Quite impressive. http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/webmap/thelakes/large/ggh1.jpg http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/webmap/thelakes/large/ggh1.jpg
calibas 4y ago
> Brasil, also known as Hy-Brasil and several other variants, is a phantom island said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland. Irish myths described it as cloaked in mist except for one day every seven years, when it becomes visible but still cannot be reached. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasil_(mythical_island) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasil_(mythical_island)

167 points by docmechanic 4y ago

New study of coastal geography and a medieval map.

I hate when the articles have no images, so here are a few: Wikipedia page about the legend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantre%27r_Gwaelod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantre%27r_Gwaelod The PDF of the research article is in https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/ag/article/view/32596/1882528188 https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/ag/article/view/32596/... (https://doi.org/10.4138/atlgeo.2022.005 https://doi.org/10.4138/atlgeo.2022.005) The old map with the islands is in page 5 and a new map with the sea depth is in page 7.

docmechanic 4y ago
Thank you! Surely there is a Welsh writer of science fiction or fantasy that can make good use of this knowledge ...
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  Is this a reference to Susan Cooper?
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    That was my first thought on seeing the headline as well.
  - docmechanic 4y ago
    No, but she's exactly the sort of writer that I was thinking of.
tpmx 4y ago
Wikipedia: > Legends of the land suggest that it may have extended 20 miles west of the present coast. Any idea of how large these lands were, area-wise?
- gus_massa 4y ago
  From the research article: > The dimensions of the offshore islands may be estimated in proportion to these respective two sets of measurements, so that the southern island measures approximately 6.6 × 3.8 km (ca. 19.7 km^2) and the northern island 10.7 × 5.8 km (ca. 48.7 km^2), and that the islands lie ca. 3.5–4.0 km from the mainland shore. However, these measurements must be viewed with extreme caution given the poor areal accuracy of the Gough Map. Later in the article they estimate that the sea erosion was 5-10m/y and the alleged islands disappeared in 5 approximately centuries, so a width of 5km is consistent.
lumost 4y ago
It does make you wonder if the legend of atlantis is simply due to a myriad of ancient civilizations that vanished under rising oceans. Given human population centers cluster around ocean ports/rivers with easy access to fresh drinking water. It seems entirely plausible that estimates of human population size at the end of the last ice age may be substantially off.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  There is no "legend" of Atlantis, it's simply an allegory in Plato's works. To the best of our knowledge, no one in the ancient world believed that Atlantis had existed, any more than we believe today that Hogwarts was a real place.
  - cvoss 4y ago
    How does one discern whether a story is a history or a fiction, thousands of years afterward? Language and culture shift dramatically in that time. (Actual question, not rhetorical.) If Plato is the only one who recounts the story, that doesn't show he invented it. Stories of actual events are lost all the time. Why would it be surprising to hear a story about a thing from only one remaining and preserved source?
    - astine 4y ago
      You can tell by actually reading the account and knowing a little bit about the context. Plato's account is of a civilization that was defeated in a war with Athens ten thousand years before his time. Because Athens did not exist ten thousand years before Plato (something we can confirm through archeology) we know that Plato's account can't be true. Given that the point of the story is to demonstrate the importance of Athens, (according to the character Critias, Athens is so important that people in Egypt are still relating this story of something that happened thousands of years ago,) it's definitely a fiction. Plato's dialogues were works of fiction that used fictionalized versions of real people as characters in order to illustrate philosophical points. The guy who relates the story of Atlantis is Critias, one of the members of the Thirty Tyrants, a clique who ruled Athens for a while, and Critias claims that he got the story from his distant ancestor Solon who was one of the lawgivers for Athens. To a contemporary of Plato's this would be as if he'd written a story about George Bush, relating a story that he'd gotten originally from George Washington, about how the United States had once fought a war against a long-lost evil empire back in the bronze-age. You weren't supposed to think it was true.

balentio 4y ago

Wasn't this posted to Hacker News before?

gus_massa 4y ago
I only could find this from another URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32542953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32542953 (2 points | 12 days ago | 0 comments) Note that from the FAQ: > Are reposts ok? If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates. I sometimes link old post with low points or few comments when one of the comments is very interesting and explain or debunk the post. But in this case there is nothing interesting in the old discussion. (Is the other URL better? Both look similar to me.)

jbverschoor 4y ago

Why do people always think that things from the past are simply not real. “They”(us in the future) could say the exact same thing about all the things that are real in our current lives. All these mythical creatures (soon to be extinct) Having such a surplus of fresh water. At a certain point they will just deny Dubai was created

nelblu 4y ago
It is human nature to glorify the past and romanticize the greatness of "those days". There is nothing wrong in maintaining a healthy skeptical mind towards outrageous claims. Further the onus of proof lies on the person making the claim.
fritztastic 4y ago
> At a certain point they will just deny Dubai was created That reminds me of a (reportedly fake) quote attributed to Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum: “My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson is going to ride a Land Rover, but my great-grandson is going to have to ride a camel again.”
simonh 4y ago
There are plenty of things from the past that are absolutely real. We have tons of physical evidence for settlements all over the world throughout history. I’m sure there’s more yet to be discovered. But until we discover it, it’s just hearsay. There may well have been a real place that inspired Plato’s mention if Atlantis, but only one. Not the many hundreds of possible locations suggested over the centuries. They can’t all be Atlantis, if any of them are.
- ecolonsmak 4y ago
  200yrs from now well meaning discussion will consider if the long extinct elephant was in fact mythical
  - simonh 4y ago

fritztastic 4y ago

It's always interesting (for me) to learn of lost lands- from before humans were around, too, but especially those mentioned in human stories. There are many of these [1]- some of which are the subject of fascinating and informative documentaries, such as this one about Doggerland [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_lands?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_lands?wprov=sfla1 [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DECwfQQqRzo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DECwfQQqRzo

sveme 4y ago

Pretty similar to the story of Rungholt[1], which is clearly no longer myth, but fact, with lots of remnants being found. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rungholt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rungholt

paganel 4y ago

> Evidence from the Roman cartographer Ptolemy suggests the coastline 2000 years ago may have been some 13 km further out to sea than it is today. This sort of stuff doesn't get repeated often enough in this day and age, we live with the illusion that the sea levels as we now have them should remain the same over the next centuries no matter what.

988747 4y ago
It does not get repeated because it would suggest that sea level changes are natural, as opposed to being caused by industrial CO2 emissions, and limiting CO2 emissions is a huge business right now.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  I imagine that most people haven’t thrown gasoline on a fire. Surely they can’t understand making something bad way more worse than it was.
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  >It does not get repeated because it would suggest that sea level changes are natural Sea level changes are absolutely natural and have fluctuated wildly over the history of the planet. The sea level was 360 feet lower 13,000 years ago. Certainly human activity has a measurable effect on the environment but it is simply absurd to pretend that our environment (including sea levels) isn't in a constant state of flux.
  - Ma8ee 4y ago
    The problem now is that the change is some orders of magnitude faster than they used to be.
    - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
      That isn't true at all. The history of the planet is marked by rapid, repeated changes in the climate. The climate is going to change - drastically - just like it has for the entire history of the earth. We should understand that our activity has an influence but it is not the only factor or the dominant one. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ContentFeature/GlobalWarming/images/epica_temperature.png https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ContentFeature/GlobalWarmi...

theknocker 4y ago

galgot 4y ago

Could it be that the Ys city legend in Brittany was this Welsh legend transposed in Brittany, when the Bretons (originally Welsh peoples) migrated there... very interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ys

Nursie 4y ago
And don't forget Lyonesse, a Cornish lost land, with related language and people - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyonesse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyonesse

tombh 4y ago

I grew up in this part of the world! Quite a strange juxtaposition seeing my home on the front page of this site. So maybe I can offer some lesser known interesting context: Wales is only some 300km west of London, yet I have childhood memories (some 35 years ago) of needing to try to speak Welsh to my elderly (in his 80s) neighbour who struggled with English. There is a theory that English's use of "do" (so-called "Do-support") comes from the Welsh language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-support#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-support#Origins The stones for Stonehenge come from the Preseli mountains, a small range of blue-ish hills exactly on the coast where these lost islands are proposed. There is a Welsh settlement in Argentina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Wladfa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Wladfa Not strictly Welsh, but the Severn Estuary, which is the calm, funnel of sea between Wales and England, that invites ships into the harbour of Bristol, points exactly towards Newfoundland in North America. This Welsh-English estuary is where John Cabot made the second recorded voyage of a modern European to the New World[1]. Nowadays, we think of Airports as being the doorways to whole new worlds, but there was a time when it was the coastline and harbours of the South West British Isles that rang and echoed with the adventures, legends, captains, pirates, spices, gems and foreigners of unimaginable far away lands. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot#Second_voyage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot#Second_voyage

r3trohack3r 4y ago
> Nowadays, we think of Airports as being the doorways to whole new worlds I have a habit of parking on the top floors of parking garages for the views. A few months back, I was parked on the top floor of PHX at night waiting to pick up a friend. I sat and watched the planes depart and arrive for 45 minutes or so. From my angle, they were quite small and I was able to take in several runways of activity simultaneously. Looking to the left there were constellations of aircraft lining up to approach the runways. The scale of "Sky Harbor" was lost on me until that moment, watching these aircraft come to port. Some passenger planes, some cargo, all connecting distant lands. It felt like watching a shipyard. And then I realized the awe I felt at the progress of humanity was probably on-par with someone standing in a shipyard circa 1650. And the relative antiquity we feel towards them in 1650 will be felt towards us in 2300. What they had wasn't any more antiquity than what I have - we both sit at the pinnacle of human civilization so far staring forward into the potential. Not sure where this ramble is going - but thank you for sharing your story and throwing me back to that moment.

UberFly 4y ago

The article says the research was based on the Gough Map. Just look at this thing. Quite impressive. http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/webmap/thelakes/large/ggh1.jpg http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/webmap/thelakes/large/ggh1.jpg

calibas 4y ago

> Brasil, also known as Hy-Brasil and several other variants, is a phantom island said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland. Irish myths described it as cloaked in mist except for one day every seven years, when it becomes visible but still cannot be reached. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasil_(mythical_island) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brasil_(mythical_island)