Jonathan Thomas (00:21)
Welcome to the Anglotopia Podcast, where we explore British travel history and culture, and I'm your host, Jonathan Thomas. Off the coast of Wales and Cardigan Bay, there is said to lie a drowned kingdom, sixteen cities lost beneath the waves when a drunken gatekeeper forgot to close the sluices. Off Cornwall lies Lyonesse, off Brittany, the city of Ys.

Around the coasts of Ireland and Scotland, mermaids, giants who built causeways across the sea, witches who made the land itself. We file these away as folklore, charming, fanciful, the sort of thing that you can put on a tea towel or tell children to scare them or to go to bed. My guest today says we have made a serious mistake. He argues that these stories are not fantasy at all. They are a testimony, eyewitness memories of real catastrophes, of coastlines that genuinely drown, and land that has genuinely vanished.

passed down by word of mouth for thousands of years, 8,000 years in some cases, possibly more, which would make them quite literally the oldest stories that we have. Professor Patrick Nunn is a geographer at the University of the Sunshine Coast, an honorary professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne and a visiting fellow at Oxford. He spent his career studying coastlines and how people remember them changing

Work that produced The Edge of Memory and Worlds in Shadow. His new book, published this month by Reaktion Books, is Whispers from the Celtic Seas, The True Meanings of Ancient Stories from Northwest Europe. And it will change how you look at the map of Britain. Patrick, welcome to the Anglotopia Podcast.

Patrick Nunn (01:51)
Jonathan, it's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Jonathan Thomas (01:55)
Thank you. And I I was just saying he's our first guest from Australia. The time difference is stark today. It is seven o'clock in the morning for him and four o'clock in the afternoon for me. So I'm the day before. So hello from the past.

Patrick Nunn (02:07)
Looking good.

Jonathan Thomas (02:08)
Good. I'm glad the world's still there.

Patrick Nunn (02:11)
It's a wonderful crisp morning here in southeast Queensland, yeah, just coming out of the middle of winter. really nice.

Jonathan Thomas (02:19)
So

Patrick, let's start with the claim at the heart of the book because it's a bold one. You argue that legends of drowned lands and mermaids and giants aren't inventions, they're historical records. So make the case for us.

Patrick Nunn (02:31)
Well, there's two ways to look at it. You can look at the stories themselves, or you can look at the essential implausibility of our knee-jerk reactions to these stories, which is how could they be anything but invented? You know, we live in a world of invented stories, in a world of fictions, if you like. and so we make assumptions, I think, that our ancestors did exactly the same thing, but I don't think they did. I don't think people five hundred years ago or even five thousand years ago

Had the leisure time to develop elaborate fictions and then consign them to the river of history and to pass them down through the ages. So I I have had another thought about all of this over the last few years and have come to the conclusion that yes, of course, they are memories from the past, often observations of memorable events like volcanic eruptions, like the loss of.

The catastrophic loss of land, that in a pre-literate culture, where you couldn't write these things down, you consign them to oral traditions, and those oral traditions were really couched in terms that people at the time understood. So when we look at stories of mermaids and giants, we're really looking into the minds of people hundreds, even thousands of years ago.

and the way they conceived the world and the way they recorded, if you like, or encoded their observations of of deep time, of deep history. and yeah, that's that's the that that's it, Jonathan.

Jonathan Thomas (04:17)
So you're a geographer, not a folklorist. So how did a scientist who studies coastlines and sea levels end up taking myths seriously as seriously as data? What was the moment you realized that these stories actually might be telling some sort of truth?

Patrick Nunn (04:29)
Well, yes, I'm I'm a scientist and a conventionally trained scientist. I grew up in the in the United Kingdom and I learnt many, many of these stories from an early age and was taught to think of them as as fiction, you know, as as stories of heroes and stories from the past that were not true, that w what did I when did I have my moment of realizing that that these things

were probably true. There were two events and I'll I'll recall them as quickly as I can, but I I spent a lot of my career doing research in the Pacific Islands where many people, particularly the older generations, don't read and write and often don't speak English. And I was told stories by many of these people, often through a translator, but stories nonetheless and

It became clear to me after a while that you know listening to these stories, which could go on for hours, it was almost as though this person had a book in front of them, they were reading from a book. And so it became clear to me that people in oral cultures or pre-literate cultures are in fact able to retain and organize and pass on huge amounts of information without the benefits of

Being able to write them or read them out to someone. And then when I moved to Australia in the year 2010, I came across a lot of First Nations Australians or Aboriginal Australians stories about the past. And many of them talked about when the coastline was further out to sea and when the rise of the ocean actually started to.

cover the fringes of the land and submerge it. And it became clear to me that these stories, and they were that we now have 34 groups of stories all the way around Australia. It became clear to me that these stories were recalling the time after the last ice age or the coldest time of the last ice age when sea levels rose, the ocean surface rose around about 400 feet in total, all across the world.

and that submerged coastlines. And here's the thing, Jonathan. in Australia we know that this rise in the ocean surface a after the coldest time of the last ice age ended about seven thousand years ago. So these stories by default had to be at least seven thousand years old. They had to have been passed down for at least seven thousand years. And that really blew my mind as I I guess it would that of any conventional scientist. But I was

I was always trained, let the data speak and that's what I did in this case. So I I've started to to write about these things and yes, have have met with s quite a lot of scepticism, but at the same time people I think are generally open minded enough to listen to the arguments.

Jonathan Thomas (07:44)
So

so how did you make that leap then from 'cause your last book was about these Aboriginal traditions that you did research on? How'd you go from there to the Celtic legends of of Western Europe?

Patrick Nunn (07:57)
Right, so the the Edge of Memory, which was published in twenty eighteen, did really summarize a lot of these Aboriginal traditions from Australia. It talks about other other parts of the world as well, but focuses on Australia and really makes the the argument for these stories having been passed down for thousands of years. Yes, I'd always had this idea in the back of my mind that

I would like to apply these kinds of new understandings to the Celtic stories that I had grown up listening to. And so I'd started to do this systematically and collaborated with a a lot of scientists in the United Kingdom and also in France, and really found extraordinary similarities between a lot of the Australian stories.

recalling submergence and land loss and the stories from Northwest Europe. particularly you know, and and here's one theme that seems to reoccur, Jonathan, and that is the idea that islands can be created when the ocean surface rises and actually submerges the neck of a peninsula. So it cuts off the neck of a peninsula and there

creates an island where no island existed before. And we have dozens of known stories in Australia about how hero figures would sort of walk along the coast and would would throw out a spear and and create islands where none existed before. We have exactly the same kind of thing from places like the west coast of Ireland and from the outer Hebrides of Scotland and so on and so on.

the remarkable similarities.

Jonathan Thomas (09:53)
The

the so the obvious objection from from skeptics would be that oral tradition is can be a game of telephone, that stories degrade beyond recognition over time and over the repeated tellings, let alone mill millennia. So what's the evidence that they don't how does this knowledge survive without writing through the oral tradition?

Patrick Nunn (10:13)
I think we make a an error sometimes, Jonathan, by judging the past through our understanding of the present. And this is a theme that that reoccurs in my new book, Whispers from Celtic Seas. The the idea is that when we play these kinds of parlor games, the whole fun is how the stories degrade as you go around the circle.

It's quite different from the way things were in the past. So let's take Australia as an example, and then we're not going to focus on Australia, but it's a very harsh environment. Water is a problem everywhere in Australia. So in the past, hundreds of years ago, if you didn't know where you could find water or how you could find water, then you would die, and the bloodline that you represented would

disappear from from history. So survival was contingent upon knowing everything that your ancestors knew with precision, with accuracy. And how does knowledge survive that long without writing? Well, it it survives in that way, of course. But the fact is that it survives and and this really you know is something that I always say to skeptics

Is why are you skeptical that a story can be passed down for thousands of years? You're skeptical because it doesn't happen today, because we have reading and writing which enable us to preserve information in other ways. So we've forgotten, if you like, what our ancestors in oral societies did. Can I give you just one quick example from the United States? So

Jonathan Thomas (12:06)
Yeah, go

ahead.

Patrick Nunn (12:07)
From from Crater Lake in Oregon in the Western United States. Crater Lake, beautiful place with Wizard Island in the center. That represents the remains of a giant volcano called, or we call it today, Mount Mazama. And that blew itself to pieces in the past. And Mount Mazama itself collapsed into the into the magma chamber, the empty magma chamber beneath, and created Crater Lake.

now when the first European settlers got into that area, the local people, the Klamath people, they told them this story. They told them that a mountain once existed here and there was a great conflict between two gods. and the mountain collapsed and formed Crater Lake, and they avoided Crater Lake because the god of the underworld still lived there and it was a dangerous place to go. Now that

volcano erupted seven thousand six hundred years ago. that's it. I mean there is no alternative explanation for the Klamath story having been passed on seven thousand six hundred years ago since this cataclysmic event. So the fact is that ancient stories do get passed on in the right circumstances for thousands of years.

And we now have dozens of examples from all over Australia and all over North West Europe. i you know, to me the evidence is insurmountable. But of course, scepticism remains. fine.

Jonathan Thomas (13:46)
So,

moving moving to to a European setting, the your your book opens with a wonderful object, the Kolinda Harpoon. It's a twelve thousand year old antler fishing spear dredged out of the North Sea by a Lowestoft trawler in nineteen thirty one. So tell us the story of that and then what it revealed, 'cause it's it's so fascinating.

Patrick Nunn (14:07)
Yeah. so there was this ship the Colinda and it was fishing out of Lower Stoft and it brought up this this thing, it looked like metal. it was it was about this this long and and it it it was carved and it turned out to be a piece of deer antler that had been carved and sharpened and is is something that is w was used as a harpoon.

Now the point here is that it was found or dredged up from the floor of the North Sea. And and this incident in in what 1931, this was perhaps I think the first widespread realization that on the floor of the North Sea there were artifacts and there were remains that pointed to the fact that people may once have occupied that land. so

it it's it is a lovely story and you know it's really you know worth you know digging into some more but I I always feel that that this particular story so it was used twelve thousand years ago as as a harpoon and many other types of artifacts have since been

found or dredged up from the floor of the North Sea. And we now know that there was once a a widespread human occupation there. we give it the name Doggerland, because it centres around the Dogger Bank, which is a famous fishing bank in the North Sea.

Jonathan Thomas (15:47)
So paint us a picture of Doggerland, which is a bizarre name. what was out there? w it's it's now it's the North Sea, but like you said, it was a it there's a bank there that is very shallow, so that there was a some kind of cataclysmic flood that made this area flood. So what was life like for people there before this flood happened?

Patrick Nunn (16:11)
If we go back, Jonathan, to the coldest time of the last ice age, around about 20,000 years ago in Northwest Europe, the ocean surface was about 400 feet lower than it is today, around about 125 meters lower than it is today, because this was the ice age, and all the ice that had formed on the land had been created through water evaporated from the ocean. So the ocean surface had dropped.

And that meant that there were land connections in existence joining bits of land that still exist today, land connections that have since become submerged with the subsequent melting of the ice and the rise of the sea level. And this created a huge land area for several thousand years. Once the ice went, probably around about 12,000 years until about eight.

Eight and a half thousand years, something like that, a huge area of land in what is today the North Sea that enabled free movement of animals and people and terrestrial vegetation between what is today mainland Europe and the British Isles. what was it like for people there? We we can we can see that fishing was very important, we can see that hunting of

I animals was was very important. so we suspect that people actually after the coldest time of the last ice age passed and the the the climate of the area started to warm, we can infer that people moved into this area in comparatively large numbers and started to avail themselves of the

the food sources that were there.

Jonathan Thomas (18:09)
So then so then so I I have kind of like two questions, but I'll I'll start with this. So then how how did this land become submerged? I I believe it's called the Storegga Tsunami, and it was about eighty, two hundred years ago. So what happened and then I guess the second the question that feeds into that is what happened to the people that lived there? Did they were they submerged or did they move on to the British Isles or you know, what happened to the civilization that could have existed there?

Patrick Nunn (18:39)
Yeah, that's such a good question. So y you you've got to think of this people today call it a land bridge, but of course it wasn't a land bridge. People who lived in Doggerland didn't think of themselves as living on a bridge. it was just a mass of land. but you you have to imagine that the sea level, the ocean surface was rising. So this land area was shrinking and shrinking and shrinking anyway. but yes, around about eight thousand two hundred years ago.

A huge chunk of the Norwegian continental s shelf slipped down slope and into the depths of the ocean. And that displaced a massive volume of water and created tsunamis that ran up across the Shetland Islands, the Orkney Islands, Scotland, and much of the eastern seaboard of the British Isles. when it drove south through the North Sea.

it hit the shrunken remains of Doggerland and it it smashed several passages through there. So that event, if you like, created the British Isles. it it it destroyed the land connection between the British Isles and mainland Europe around about eight thousand two hundred years ago.

Jonathan Thomas (20:01)
So then I continuing on from that, what happened to the people? What happened how did this how did this story come down in in the the oral tradition?

Patrick Nunn (20:10)
That's a really good question, and a lot of that is inference. I suspect most of the the the people were drowned except those who had already sort of moved into what we now think of as the British Isles, and you know, watched these events unfold from higher ground along the coasts of East Anglia and places like that. but the ocean rise has continued along the eastern seaboard of the British Isles, and today we you know we still have

Lots of stories that talk about places under the ocean, places that were once inhabited on the ocean floor in that area. Whether there is any echo of a memory of Dogerland, I suspect. I suspect not. but it it could well have seeded a lot of these these later stories and

It just normalized the idea of submergence. I think people living along the coasts of the British Isles and and Northwest Europe, the Atlantic coasts of Northwest Europe more generally, I think for thousands of years they witnessed the ocean surface rising and eating into the fringes of the land. and that yeah, that that absolutely normalized the idea of submergence and land loss and so on.

Jonathan Thomas (21:34)
Well and and and most prehistoric or ancient cultures have a story of a great flood. So it's interesting that these may have been different floods, but they all share that kind of commonality that the the world changed on such a massive scale and within recent, you know, living historical memory that it it made an impression.

Patrick Nunn (21:55)
absolutely, yeah, absolutely. I I think well, yes, I I it's very interesting what you just said because a lot of cultures do have a story of a great flood, and I think a lot of those stories were seeded in different ways and in different places. But in normalizing the idea of a of a massive flood, they have they have come together. So a lot of people today think of a global flood having happened in the

Jonathan Thomas (22:23)
And

it's even in my own backyard, you know, Lake Michigan, just which is a few miles from my house, it's you know, geologically, it's only five to ten thousand years old. And so it it it it's a result of those glaciers receding and a flood coming in. So it even I wonder if our local Native Americans have legends of floods in their in their in their historical record.

Patrick Nunn (22:49)
Well, I I I bet they do. I bet they do. sometimes it's it's just it's just not straightforward to identify these stories and of course i in many cases it requires a leap of faith, but it doesn't mean they don't exist.

Jonathan Thomas (23:05)
So let's let's go to Wales. it has a very famous drowned kingdom, and I'm gonna make an attempt to pronounce this. I will probably fail. So please leave a comment about how I massacred it. I'm gonna say Cantre’r Gwaelod in Cardigan Bay, with it which was supposedly 16 cities, and it's sluice gates and poor drunken

I'm gonna I can't even say these words. We're failed to close them. What's the story and what's underneath it?

Patrick Nunn (23:36)
Well, the story has persisted for a long time that off the coast of Wales, Cardigan Bay is a is perhaps the most famous example there. there once existed sixteen cities or several cities and castles and things like that. I I always worry about the words city and castle. I think that's our way of aggrandizing the our memories of the past. But the stories talk about inhabited places.

That are now underwater in places like Cardigan Bay. And one of the most persistent stories in Welsh culture talks about Cantraguylod in Cardigan Bay, which was said to be the the the seat or the the the realm, if you like, of King Gwyddno and obviously several other monarchs before and after before him, and that

One day his steward who was charged with closing the the floodgates that the sluice gates that kept the ocean out of the city, he became drunk and he forgot to do it and so the gates remained open at high tide and the water poured in and drowned the city. y you know, that tells us several things and you know, we laugh about the drunken steward and and that

the the duties he failed to perform, but the essence of that story there, around which all the other detail has been built, the essence of that story is that there once existed inhabited places on the floor of what is today Cardigan Bay, and these places became submerged or overwhelmed, if you like, by the ocean. And of course that's absolutely true. you know, people were living in that part of Wales.

10, 11,000, 12,000 years ago, when the ocean surface was, you know, tens of meters lower than it is today. So people undoubtedly did occupy that area and they did create places to live, familiar landscapes that were subsequently submerged. So the story itself is not incredible. But skeptics, of course, often focus on the minutiae.

on the sort of the the the minor details about you know drunken stewards and things like that. and all of those sorts of details I think were added as this story passed down through time. these st these details were added to make the story more entertaining and more relatable and so on.

Jonathan Thomas (26:13)
Yeah, there's you point out in your book that there's a marvelous piece of evidence called the Gough map, the oldest surviving map of Britain, which is from around thirteen sixty. And there are actually two islands drawn in Cardigan Bay that aren't there today. So tell us about that.

Patrick Nunn (26:28)
Well, you've said it really well, Jonathan. So on the wall of the the Bodleian Library and the University of Oxford there's this massive map, called the Gough Map, and that was it's believed to be the oldest known map of the United Kingdom, such as it is, and there were two scholars from Oxford who analysed this map and they found, yeah, two islands in Cardigan Bay that don't exist there anymore.

The idea being is that in the year thirteen sixty there were memories of these islands that were sufficiently compelling for the cartographer to put them on the map. I don't think the islands existed in the thirteen sixties, but I think the memories existed and therefore were put on the map in that sense. And that's absolutely remarkable. I mean it it really is. You know, the idea that there is

confirmation or corroboration, if you like, of these ancient stories in things like old old maps. yeah, a absolutely wonderful.

Jonathan Thomas (27:37)
And

so let's move to nearby Cornwall and there's the legend of Leoness, which is has a Arthurian ten art has Arthurian connections where there's this lost land of Lionesse And t the tell us about the antiquarian William Borlase, who is a character in his own right. Who was he and what did he contribute to how we think of these legendary lands off of Cornwall?

Patrick Nunn (28:01)
Well, let me just find my piece of paper about William Boleys. So yeah, Willi William Boleys lived in the 18th century. and he was he he had a a doctorate from the University of Oxford, but he he was essentially just a country parson who lived in the the Cornwall that where he was born. and in growing up he had developed a huge

respect if you like for the ancient stories and the ancient traditions of Cornwall. And he focused on this story of Lyonesse. And Lyonesse is a submerged land that exists somewhere off the coast of Cornwall or the Scilly Isles. And it it is a it is a land that was like Cantraguelod in Cardigan Bay, was

rapidly submerged and people save themselves just in time and all this kind of thing. So again, those are the kinds of details that were probably added much later on to a story of submergence, of land being submerged. And that land probably wasn't even called Lyonesse when when this happened. But William Bourles was a very dogged researcher for someone in the middle of the ninth, the mid-18th century.

and he went all across Cornwall and the Scilly Isles and he he wrote books about what they called in those days the antiquities and all sorts of things. and it's it's really fascinating to to read about him and the way he went about this. But he became convinced, as I'm convinced, he could became convinced that stories about Lyonesse referred not to Cornwall but to the Scilly isles offshore. So if you go

30 miles off Land's End in the southwestern point of the British Isles or the conteminous British Isles, you find the Scilly Isles, which today are several islands, probably about 10 larger inhabited islands. and in the past, if you go back six or seven thousand years, they would have been one single island because the ocean surface was lower.

And there were people living there. We know that Mesolithic people lived there, we know that Neolithic people lived there. So it's probably been continuously occupied from around nine, ten thousand years ago, the the Scilly Isles. And the story of the submergence of Lyonesse talks about the loss of land, and I think that's exactly what happened to people in Neolithic times living on the Scilly Isles.

You suddenly were living on this great landmass, and then suddenly it became cut up as the ocean surface cut connections between what became islands. so your livelihoods were constrained, the places you could go were constrained, your relationships with your neighbors were constrained, all of these things happened, and it must have been quite traumatizing for people, you know, thirty miles off the mainland to be undergoing this kind of thing. And I suspect

very strongly that this is what seeded the stories about Lyonesse. and William Boleys he he got to the cilies and he looked around at these things and he developed this argument on the basis of what he saw and what he heard. And I think in doing that he has left us a unique legacy from from the past. Not everyone took these kinds of stories seriously, but he did.

and he was able to speak Cornish and that was the language in which most of them at that time were were communicated. So yeah, look he was he was a brilliant fellow and I admire I admire him greatly.

Jonathan Thomas (32:08)
Let's

talk about giants. this is one of your arguments that I find really fascinating. You suggest that when a memory became too implausible for later generations, such as people walking across what is now the open sea, the story didn't die, it adapted, and these people became giants. So let's talk about that. Walk us through that transformation.

Patrick Nunn (32:27)
Sure. Well, I think at the at the basis of all this, you have this idea in oral societies that if you don't pass information on from one generation to the next, the chances of that subsequent generation surviving becomes less. It's the same reason that we you know we educate children. we explain how the world is and we help them to survive when that world

throws up challenges to them. Now, in oral societies, most of the information was passed on through narrative. Yes, of course, it was also passed on through poetry and through performance and through through singing, but I think narrative was perhaps the key way in which stories were passed down. So if you wanted your audience to listen, you had to make your stories

Entertaining and compelling. you had to make them believable to store to an audience that might become quite skeptical when you were recounting details from the past. So sorry, that's rather a convoluted way of of getting to your to your question, Jonathan. the the notion of giants, I believe, came about because people, storytellers, were trying to explain to

Each new generation of people that in the past these two areas of land, now separated by 30 miles of ocean, were connected. That there was if like a land bridge or there was a land connection between the two that allowed people to walk freely. And you can imagine an audience 2,000 years, even 200 years after this event, after the connection had been drowned. You can imagine them.

Thinking, well, I don't really get this, you know. There's you I can see the ocean out there. Are you really telling me that people could walk across there? So those people became giants because that was the way in which you could rationalize these stories and make them credible to each new generation of people. and the giants became bigger and bigger through time because the ocean gaps became wider and wider. So instead of saying people used to walk across land.

Is no longer there. Used to say, well, people used to in the past were giants, and they simply stretched out their their legs and walked from one landmass to to the next. So absolutely, I think giants were invented maybe the wrong word, but giants were brought into narrative traditions to make those traditions credible. when they were talking about

Land connections that had been submerged.

Jonathan Thomas (35:28)
How how do you tell the difference between a story encoding a real event and one that's simply a good story? What's your method? How do you how do you make the case for one way or the other?

Patrick Nunn (35:41)
That's also a very good question, Jonathan. There's no there's no sort of magic formula really. It's just a case of you know looking at a particular tradition in a different way. I I think people in the past, and I'm going back here, you know, 500, 5,000 years, when people did not read and write.

They communicated orally and they created bodies of oral tradition that they passed on from one generation to the next. I don't think there were many simply invented stories in that. When we look at what we call today myths and legends in many cultures, but particularly in Celtic cultures, we often see a very elaborate story with all sorts of implausible detail. But at the core of that story,

There is what I would consider to be an empirical truth, something that people actually did observe. So they actually observed the submergence of this land connection. They put it into story, and to make that story credible, they added all kinds of detail. But the essence of the story, the kernel of truth in these stories, is still there. Look, sometimes it's not there. You talk to me about.

Little Red Riding Hood or stories like that. Maybe there was once a an empirical truth at the heart of these stories, but it's hard to know what it is. Maybe these were just morality stories or fables or things like that. I don't pretend that all stories our ancestors told in the past had had meaning of this kind, but I think a lot more of them do than we give our ancestors credit for.

Jonathan Thomas (37:38)
And so your your book kind of has a contemporary resonance by bringing these old stories to the fore. We're once again living in an in an age through rising sea levels and disappearing coastlines, especially in Britain. So does that change how we should listen to these old stories? Does give them more power and resonance?

Patrick Nunn (37:57)
So I think there are many lessons that we can learn from these stories that can help us navigate the uncertainty of future climate change. I think the first of those lessons is that climate change is not without precedent in human history. We have been here before as a species from about 15,000 years ago until about 6,000 years ago, along most coastlines in Northwest Europe.

We had a rise of sea level, generation after generation, completely unstoppable. a rise in sea level that caused land loss and forced people to adapt. And we are being forced to adapt today. I mean, whether or not we believe in a particular cause of rising temperatures and rising sea levels, it's very difficult, I think, to deny that

Temperatures are rising in general, and that sea level is rising. And you're right, there's evidence all around the coast of the British Isles that that show us this. So I think the idea of climate change not being unprecedented in human history is an important one. But I also think that another very important lesson is about the need to adapt. So we

argue today or scientists argue today, politicians argue about the degree to which we need to adapt to rising sea levels. Well I think the past tells us that if we don't adapt, then we will have to eventually. You know, sea level rise tends to be a long-term process and that even though we may be skeptical at the moment about how long this might last, it's something that's happened before and I think

there there is a clear lesson in the stories from the past about how this might all happen again and therefore the sooner we adapt, the sooner we utilise the lessons from these stories to illuminate the future, the better.

Jonathan Thomas (40:09)
So and and if and if these stories really are a form of testimony, what does that say about what else might be encoded in these traditions that we've dismissed? What are we still not listening to?

Patrick Nunn (40:19)
I think it these stories, Jonathan, they tell us an awful lot about how humans in the past coped with with risk, particularly environmental risk. you know, there's this I know there aren't many active volcanoes in the United Kingdom, but you know, people in the past developed ways of living sustainably close to active volcanoes.

And we can learn from a lot of those a lot of those adaptations, if you like, going into the future. I think, and this may be a little bit a little bit off to one side, but we've talked about how people in the past adapted to rising sea levels in the same way as we're adapting at the moment. We're building seawalls. Well, you know, people in the past off the coasts of Scotland, off the coasts of of Brittany.

we found the remains of the seawalls that people built seven, eight, nine thousand years ago. all the stories about Cantra Guilod and places like that, they all talk about these cities in inverted commas being surrounded by by walls. so people adapted their coastal living in the past in the same way as we're doing it today. But one of the really interesting things is about mitigation. So mitigation in climate change terms.

Talks about addressing the causes of things like sea level rise. And today science believes that it understands, and I'm not disputing it, that the causes of sea level rise. 6,000, 7,000 years ago, the sea level was rising, and people would have had their own ideas about what was causing it. And a lot of those ideas led to

mitigation strategies and a lot of those mitigation strategies, sorry if this is getting a bit boring, but a lot of those strategies involved ceremonies and the building of elaborate structures, stone circles and things like that along the coasts of the British Isles and elsewhere. And I think today that a lot of these stone circles were not just some, you know, random place where

druids conducted ceremonies that we don't know anything about. I I think they were places where people deliberately tried to

embed solutions to the rising sea level. It was incredibly traumatizing this sea level rise and the land loss associated with it generation after generation. So I I think that people had developed explanations for the sea level rising and had enacted all sorts of ceremony or quasi-religious solutions to try and stop it.

Jonathan Thomas (43:15)
And so for our listeners, many of whom are Americans who love traveling to Britain, where would you send

Patrick Nunn (43:18)
Mm.

Jonathan Thomas (43:20)
them to stand and feel this history? Which coasts still carry the whispers most powerfully?

Patrick Nunn (43:26)
There are dozens of examples, Jonathan, and I don't mean to to dodge the question, I'm not dodging the question. when I think of all the places that I've been and all the places that move me most, off the coast of Wales, we've talked about Cardigan Bay. But if you go a bit further north, just past the island of Anglesey, you come into Conwy Bay. And in Conwy Bay, like in Cardigan Bay, there are also stories about places that

People once lived that are now underwater. And there are dozens of these kinds of stories there. And it's a big, it's a big holiday area at the moment, but I think in the past it was quite different. And just at the head of Conwy Bay, there's a huge area of sort of mud flats and marshland and things like that, called the Lavan Sands. And the old English name for the Lavan Sands means the place of weeping. And

I think that there is so much sadness associated with the loss of land in the past. and some of that sentiment is preserved in place names. And I'm always very moved when I when I go to that part of the you know, the the British coast, the Welsh coast around Conwy Bay. The other place, if I can have a second choice, would really be the Outer Hebrides Islands of Scotland.

And look, they're not that difficult to get to these days. You could fly from any of the Scottish mainland airports to Stornoway on the island of Lewis and y you can you know rent a car from there and you can catch a couple of ferries and things like that. Yeah. So but yeah, go go in don't go in the middle of winter. but the the outer Hebrides Islands there are so many stories that were fortuitously

Fortuitously recorded in the 19th century that talk about how one island was once connected to another. And there's one island or one island group I've never actually been to. I've looked at it from the nearby coast called the Monach Islands, M-O-N-A-C-H islands. And they lie about seven or eight kilometers off the west coast of the island of North Uist, UI S-T.

And that land connection was submerged about 6,800 years ago. And there were still stories being told about that by the people of the Monarch Islands in the late 19th century. and those stories were remarkably detailed. They they talked about the names of the people who'd last crossed this this land connection, and the people who drowned subsequently trying to cross it. They talked about the names given to the

structures that they built there. You know, all of this nearly 7,000 years ago. And that absolutely absolutely moves me. and I just wondered if I could just quickly read something for your readers. This won't won't take more than a second. But a lot of these stories from this part of Scotland were were gathered by Alexander Carmichael.

in the second half of the 19th century. And he was from the Outer Hebrides and he he was a an unusually tall man and he was well known for walking across the ocean gaps between between islands the very places that he was writing about having having been submerged

And one evening Carmichael was returning to his home on Benbecula Island from South Uist, where he'd been collecting Gaelic poems. The night was dark, and the ford between the islands lived up to its name, the ford of the coming storm. As Carmichael waded nearly breast-through one salt stream after another, he was conscious of the roll and the singing of waters, and the rhythm of a poem he'd taken down a few hours before. And here's the key couplet of that poem: Eyes Are You to the Blind.

staff to the Lone Pilgrim. And I'm really moved by that, in in the sense that

The Lone Pilgrim are the people who used to collect these stories at a time when literacy was spreading and people were developing a contempt for these stories. And then that sense they were giving eyes to the blind. They were illuminating the past for those of us today, you know, a hundred years or more after. and I think that there there's that there's a lot of that around. So those would be my my two sort of top choices, Conwy Bay and North Wales and

you know, the the outer hebrides of Scotland, particularly around north Uist and that area there.

Jonathan Thomas (48:31)
Well, Patrick, this has been genuinely captivating. I don't think I'll ever look at a bay or a stretch of coast the same way again. And I suspect a good many of our listeners feel the same. So thank you so much for joining us on the Anglotopia podcast. The book is Whispers from Celtic Seas, The True Meanings of Ancient Stories from Northwest Europe. There it is on the screen if you're watching on YouTube. And it's out on August 4th from Reaktion Books. The link will be in the show notes, along with links to Patrick's earlier books. So if you enjoyed this episode,

Please subscribe, like, or comment and tell us the Drown Land legend from your own stretch of coast over on YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook. And if you love the Anglotopia podcast, please consider joining the Friends of Anglotopia Club, where you can get early access to new episodes and connect with other Britain enthusiasts. So join us next time as we continue exploring the people, places, and stories that make Britain's history and culture so endlessly fascinating to discover. Thank you, Patrick.

Patrick Nunn (49:25)
Thank you very much, Jonathan. It's been a real pleasure.