by Patrick Nunn
By taking the observations in all the 21 groups of Aboriginal stories recounted in the last chapter and comparing these observations to the sea-level curve in Figure 4.3 using the method described, we come up with minimum age ranges for all. The results are summarised in Table 4.1 below.
Table 4.1 Water depths and age ranges for the 21 groups of Aboriginal stories. Age ranges refer to the most recent time at which the observations of lower-than-present water depths could have been made.
As can be seen, while two of these groups of stories are adjudged likeliest to be recent, because they do not demand a lower-than-present sea level, the other 19 are all more than 7,250 years old. At least two – from Kangaroo Island and Cape Chatham – appear to have survived for more than 10,000 years to reach us today.
When confronted by this conclusion, the author’s first reaction was scepticism – profound scepticism. For who among scientists, especially conventionally trained scientists inculcated with the dangers of exaggeration and overstatement, would not look askance at a claim of an oral tradition with a longevity of more than 10 millennia? Yet, notwithstanding the caveats of their interpretation, that is what the data show – and no competent scientist should shy away from stating such conclusions.
While it is possible to argue (as in Chapter 2) that for perhaps 65,000 years Australian Aboriginal cultures have been uniquely configured to capture such observations in stories and, more importantly, to render their effective trans-generational transmission, it is possible that similarly ancient stories exist in other cultures. Perhaps these stories have not proved so readily identifiable because they have been watered down by cultural mixing, and the influences of another race’s worldviews that have discouraged their preservation. Perhaps they have been dressed up in bearskins of narrative beneath which it is difficult to burrow. Perhaps the languages in which the original stories were recorded and transmitted have died, dragging with them into the graveyard of history all the cognitive paraphernalia that defined a particular group of people. Nonetheless, possibilities remain.
The next chapter therefore moves beyond Australia to see whether drowning stories dating from the period of postglacial sea-level rise might plausibly survive in other parts of the world, allowing their cultures to claim a cultural continuity comparable to that of Aboriginal Australia.
CHAPTER FIVE
Other Oral Archives of Ancient Coastal Drowning
When Nantes-based artist Marjorie Le Berre was growing up in rural Brittany, France, in the 1970s, she once witnessed the activities of a conteur or traditional storyteller when he visited a farm close to Les Monts d’Arrée. He was an elderly man, probably in his seventies, and he came to the farm in fulfilment of his traditional role, to tell the people living in this area some of the old stories that he knew, which had been passed down to him by his ancestors, a line of hereditary conteurs. Marjorie’s father and grandfather had had similar experiences of listening to conteurs, who play a traditional role in Brittany society; their stories are only ever told orally, never written down by them. Her grandfather remembered that when he was young, an itinerant conteur would be honoured by any village in which he arrived; its inhabitants would typically gather outdoors around a fire in the evening to listen respectfully to his stories, which were enlivened by performance.
One story often repeated by Breton conteurs and conteuses was about the drowned city of Ys (Caer Ys), which once stood on dry land within what is now Douarnenez Bay, close to the modern village of Camaret-sur-Mer. Prefacing the telling of this story, the conteur would recall how today, when the wind blows and agitates the waters of the bay, the bells in the drowned church steeple toll – a constant reminder of the presence of Ys here. Then the conteur would relate the story of King Gradlon of Ys, whose daughter did not obey his instructions about the security of the city and, opening its gates during a storm, let in the ocean, drowning Ys forever (see colour plate section).1
This story has, of course, been written down on many occasions and in different versions. Various sites off the coast of Brittany for the drowned city have been mooted, which may suggest that a similar series of events happened at more than one location.2 For example, in the sixteenth century the city of Ys was believed by one writer to have been near Quimper:
Still today [in ad 1588] the local people point out the ruins and remains of the [city’s] walls, so well mortared that the sea has not been able to carry them away, and they say that King Gradlon was in it at the time it was ruined. These are accidents that have often happened elsewhere by similar encroachments of the sea … but of those things there is no witness but an old rumour noised from person to person. 3
In a well-regarded 1899 account by Paul Sébillot, the town of Is (Ys) is said to have existed once off the coast of modern Saint-Malo, between it and the island of Cézembre, and was protected from the ocean by a dyke. But conflict erupted between the people of Is and those living in the forests of Corseul, inland of Saint-Malo. The king of Is gave the Corseulois a final warning, but they responded by cutting the dyke, making a massive hole through which the sea poured into the town: ‘the city of Is was submerged and almost all its inhabitants perished’.4 Further east, Sébillot recorded that
… the fishermen of Cancale say that when the sea is beautiful and clear, one sees between the Mont Saint-Michel and the Chausey Islands the debris of walls. They are the remains of a vanished city. 5
Slightly earlier, a prominent Breton abbot, François Manet, made a systematic collection of stories of coastal submergence along the northern coast of France focused, unsurprisingly, on the sites of former monasteries. He identified four of these – Menden, Taurac, Maudan and St Moack’s – the last having been burnt ‘in a fit of passion’ in the year ad 709 by Rivallon, the King of Brittany’s brother, who ‘afterwards, being penitent, … re-established it in a better state’.6
In the majority of the Breton accounts, the key details involve a town (or monastery) located on the Brittany coast at a time when this lay several kilometres seawards of its current position. It is reasonable to infer that the town’s location had become, perhaps for several centuries, progressively threatened by the ocean to the extent that its inhabitants had constructed artificial structures to keep it out. The town’s destruction came when this infrastructure finally proved unequal to the task for which it had been designed and the ocean poured into the city, flooding it probably more rapidly than the time it would have taken for everyone to leave – perhaps drowning many people. As time went on, the town was abandoned and the sea rose over it, obscuring it from view, perhaps even leading to its precise location becoming uncertain today.
Such a succession of events – the building of a coastal town, the construction of infrastructure to keep out the ocean, the flooding of the city and its eventual submergence – is plausibly explained as an effect of rising sea levels similar to the observations of Aboriginal Australians related in Chapter 3. The key difference here is that while the sea level reached its present level around Australia some 7,000 years ago, not generally rising more than a metre or two above it subsequently, this is not the case for Brittany, nor indeed for many other Atlantic coasts in Europe. In these places, the sea level has been rising pretty much continuously since the end of the Last Glacial Maximum – the coldest time of the last ice age – 18,000 years ago. Thus any stories about coastal drowning in this part of the world could be significantly younger than has been deduced for those in Australia.
Following the methods for assigning minimum ages to such oral traditions described at the end of the last chapter, we could apply the same to the Ys stories. Yet with these, we also have some historical detail that can be compared with our age estimates, for King Gradlon and others mentioned in some of the Breton drowning stories are believed to have been real people, historical characters whose exploits and their timing are a matter of record. For example, a biography of St Guenolé, who famously drowned the perfidious Dahut, daughter of King Gradlon, to right the
wrong she had done that led to the flooding of Ys, was written in the ninth century and records that he died on 3 March in the year ad 532 at the age of 72 at Landévennec monastery, which he had founded decades earlier.7 Clearly, if he was indeed involved in the story of Ys, then its drowning can be bracketed in time between about ad 490 and ad 530, just over 1,500 years ago. Yet events far back in history are subject to being concertinaed, transposed on one another even though they were actually separated by centuries, perhaps even millennia. Similarly people, particularly noted characters like King Gradlon, can find themselves having lived numerous lives, apparently involved in incidents centuries, sometimes millennia, apart. So perhaps sea level is a more reliable key to the antiquity of such traditions.
During the last ice age, sea level worldwide averaged 120m (400ft) or so below its present mean level. In north-west Europe, one of the clearest differences in the landscape would have been the connection of the British Isles to the European mainland. They were not as they are today, and have been for most of their written history, an island kingdom, but were then – some 20,000 years ago – an appendage of the continent. One of the last-surviving pieces of the land bridge – Doggerland – was discussed in Chapter 4, but the situation was also quite different further south and west, in the region between Brittany (France) and Cornwall (England). Today the French call the water gap La Manche, while their northern neighbours call it the English Channel, but during the last ice age it was all dry land, readily traversed and almost certainly comparatively densely populated. A river meandered westwards along its axis, cutting a broad valley and eventually emptying into the Atlantic Ocean across the continental shelf (Figure 5.1). Then, beginning about 18,000 years ago, the sea level started rising. Ponderously yet inexorably, the region’s geography was transformed. A benign terrestrial landscape was converted to a formidable marine gap, with the few remaining islands generally close to the continent’s margins on each shore.
Figure 5.1 The coasts of north-west Europe today and at the coldest time of the last ice age about 18,000 years ago. The locations of some of the main places discussed are shown.
Might the stories about submerged cities off the coast of Brittany be distant memories of the postglacial sea-level rise that created today’s La Manche? Are there stories from the other side, from the coasts of the British Isles and Ireland, which refer to the English Channel and can be similarly interpreted?
The earlier analysis of the Breton stories – the transition from a coastal town/city that came to need protection from the sea, and its subsequent drowning and submergence – is suggestive of the progressive effects of rising sea levels. As is the case with stories discussed later in this chapter, the drowning of such cities is often recalled as a catastrophic event, something that abruptly destroyed the habitability of such vulnerable coastal places. This is readily explained by the superimposition of extreme sea-level events (like storm surges or even tsunamis) on a steadily rising sea level. The effects of extreme events become incrementally greater even though their magnitude (relative to the average sea level at the time) may not differ significantly from earlier such events. The situation is similar to that of today. The global sea level is rising, but along many coasts it is not the effects of rising mean sea level that are having the most impact. Instead, it is the effect of the extreme events superimposed on this rising sea level that are proving most memorable.8
Even though the Breton stories about Ys and other submerged towns and cities might conceivably recall postglacial sea-level rise, there is a clear disparity – of perhaps several millennia – between the time of the observations on which these stories must be based and the time of their historical associations. Yet, as with the 21 groups of Australian Aboriginal stories (Chapter 3), most of which are saying the same thing, the existence of stories beyond Brittany from elsewhere along the coasts of north-west Europe, which all say essentially the same thing, provides the strongest evidence that they also represent ancient human memories of the effects of postglacial sea-level rise. For if they recalled only localised events, then why would they be saying the same thing? Here we review stories from the Channel Islands (off the coasts of northern France), Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and East Anglia, where – to greater or lesser degrees – there are extant stories similar to those from Brittany. Considered together, they are compelling evidence that the indigenous peoples of north-west Europe witnessed postglacial sea-level rise and enshrined their observations in stories that have reached us today, largely through oral means.
The Channel Islands (Îles de la Manche) comprise four large islands – Alderney, Guernsey, Jersey and Sark – and a number of smaller ones, close to the coast of northern France. One story, published in 1899, recorded how ‘in past times, the [English] Channel was not as great as it is now; one could go to Jersey [from mainland France] without encountering any obstacle other than a brook which was not very wide’.9 Many of the smallest, now uninhabitable islands in the Channel Islands show abundant signs of having formerly sustained larger numbers of people, presumably when the islands were themselves larger, as would have been the case when the sea level was lower. The names of some of these islands, particularly those like Ecréhous, Brecqhou and Lihou, which include the suffix hou (meaning house), suggest that they were once large enough to have supported sizeable populations. Yet the main evidence of once greater populations comes from thick, dense shell middens on some of these tiny islands, thought to have accumulated on the islands when they were larger and inhabited by numerous shellfish-eating people.
Submerged forests are a tangible, although not always readily observable, feature of the shallow ocean floor surrounding these islands and separating them from the adjacent continental coasts. In 1787, a local newspaper on Jersey commented that:
The trunks and roots of trees which showed themselves last winter by the agitation of the sea in St. Ouen’s Bay, and which are still visible, furnish us with a subject of contemplation relating to times very remote. One sees thousands of trees laid one close to another in this bay … 10
Today, the ocean floor between Jersey and the nearest parts of the French mainland reaches depths of 10–12m (33–40ft).
Crossing the English Channel, the people of Cornwall in south-west England (including the offshore Scilly Isles) have some stories about drowned coastal lands, perhaps the most famous of which is Lyonesse.11
Lyonesse has become grounded in English legend as the rumoured site of Avalon, to which King Arthur was carried to die, yet it also appears to be anchored in history. One of the earliest references pinpoints the date of its submergence to 11 November 1099, when it is said that ‘the sea overflowed the shore, destroying towns and drowning many persons and innumerable oxen and sheep’.12 Much later, in A Tour through Cornwall in the Autumn of 1808, the Reverend Richard Warner recounts that:
William of Worcester … states, with a degree of positive exactness, stamping authenticity upon its recital, that between Mount’s Bay [near Land’s End] and the Scilly Islands there had been woods, and meadows, and arable lands, and a hundred and forty parish churches, which before his time were submerged by the ocean. 13
If Lyonesse ever existed, and there are many who regard the story of it as allegorical, then it is possible that it was submerged by postglacial sea-level rise. Perhaps, as might have been the case for Ys, sea-level rise served simply to amplify extreme wave events, one of which tore through Lyonesse and forced its abandonment; subsequent sea-level rise hid it from history. The big wave may have been a tsunami caused by an ocean-floor earthquake in the vicinity. It is a long stretch, but one story about the destruction of Lyonesse recalls that one of its prominent residents, Trevilian, succeeded in saving his family after the first wave hit, but then barely managed to save himself after the second (or third) wave washed over him and his horse. This wave was reportedly the highest of a series, similar to the tsunami wave trains that often characterise such events. Sometimes the earthquake not only generates a wave tra
in but also causes islands close to the epicentre to sink rapidly,14 and it is possible that an island called Lyonesse was abruptly submerged during an earthquake off the coast of modern Cornwall. Tsunamis do affect this area. The great Lisbon Earthquake of 1 November 1755 that destroyed the Portuguese capital drove a train of tsunami waves onto coasts around south-west England; the third wave was reportedly by far the highest.15
When visited by Romans, perhaps around the year ad 10, the Scilly Isles are said to have numbered just 10, but by 1753 there were 140 of them. This could be interpreted as evidence for sea-level rise within this period – larger islands being subdivided by inundation – although it would be imprudent to place too much faith on the precision of the Roman count.16 Yet there is considerable evidence from the Scilly Isles of their submergence within the past millennium or more. It includes traditions of once-contiguous islands, and the remains of stone walls (locally called ‘hedges’), former field boundaries running from one island to another along the sea floor now covered by 3–4m (10–13ft) of water.17 Together with the Lyonesse tradition, such evidence for submergence does point to an observed history of sea-level rise comparable to that inferred for Brittany … and to points north.
Many traditions about ‘lost cities’ and ‘sunken palaces’ refer to the area off the west coast of Wales, particularly in Cardigan Bay, where perhaps ‘sixteen cities’ of Cantre’r Gwaelod are reputed to have been submerged. The similarities between the extant stories of the submergence of these cities and those in Brittany have been remarked upon and suggest that – at least at some point – traditions fused. The question remains whether there was in fact any original story in either Breton or Welsh tradition that, taken in tandem with empirical evidence for sea-level rise, suggests that people in these places observed the effects of rising sea levels … and that their observations still survive. The review of the Breton traditions above implies that they did, but what about the Welsh?