During the coldest period of the last great ice age, about 30,000 to 18,000 years ago, ice covered much of the British Isles. Here’s a map.
When temperatures rose and the ice melted, the ocean surface was still so low that Ireland (the island) was connected by land with Scotland, Wales and England. This allowed people and animals to cross freely over what later became the Irish Sea for probably several thousand years before the ocean rose enough to create the Irish Sea. It is possible that many ancient stories recalling when giants walked across the Irish Sea represent distant memories of these times, memories that have been passed down as oral traditions for thousands of years, across hundreds of generations without losing their essence. This can be demonstrated elsewhere in Europe (see here) but also in Australia and elsewhere, as set out in my 2018 book The Edge of Memory.
Many of the likely memories of when it was indeed possible to cross the Irish Sea come from the Fionn Saga, which recounts the exploits of Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool). One story recalls that both Fionn and his Scots rival Benandonner both built causeways across the northern Irish Sea to reach each other. Actually, the causeway (and the fact that both individuals were giants) is undoubtedly a detail added to the story later to rationalize it, to make it believable to subsequent generations of listeners. For all that, Fionn’s causeway is said to have extended from the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim while that constructed by Benandonner (the larger of the two!) extended from the Isle of Staffa. Pictures below. It is said that, following their confrontation in Ireland, Benandonner returned to Scotland pulling up the flagstones of the causeway as he walked, which is why there is no causeway visible there today.
There are also many stories in Celtic traditions about lands beneath the Irish Sea, places like Tir‐fa‐tonn, the land beneath the wave, that naturally most of us tend to consider to be romantic inventions. But if people were living on (what is now) the floor of the Irish Sea ten millennia ago, what really is the issue with supposing that their memories of this time may have sparked such stories? This is where many people laugh, even sneer, at such a suggestion because they cannot conceive of non-literate people, ones who can neither read nor write, at being able to retain such information solely within their minds – and to render it faithfully, generation upon generation, through word of mouth. This is something I have termed “the arrogance of literacy” and it is a nonsense. Pre-literate (or oral) societies were absolutely able to retain huge amounts of information in their heads and developed many means of passing this on across the generations. One place to start is my 2018 book, The Edge of Memory, which shows that such stories can be told – with a high degree of replication fidelity – for ten thousand years or more in optimal conditions. You might also look at some of the books of Lynne Kelly, especially The Memory Code.
The earliest folk traditions about King’s Cave at Drumadoon (below) on the Isle of Arran name it as the place where Fionn lived while he and his followers (féinne) hunted on Arran but also where a son was born to him. From Drumadoon, Fionn ‘formed a bridge of set of stepping‐stones across to Kintyre’ on the Scottish mainland. An earlier account noted that the ‘old people’ of Arran ‘have many ridiculous stories about Fionn and his heroes, which have been transmitted, from a remote period, by father to son, and in their progress becoming more and more extravagant … They say that Fionn made a bridge from Kintyre to this place [Drumadoon], over which he could pass, by a few steps, from one land to the other’.
These stories, all estimated to have endured more than ten thousand years, may be an echo from a time when the two landmasses were joined above sea level. And I have argued that in many cultures, stories about giant beings originated when orally transmitted memories of former dry‐land connections between nearby landmasses (when sea level was lower) started to become less plausible in their retelling, requiring embellishment and exaggeration to ensure that the stories continued to be told.
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