The Isle of Man lies in the centre of the Irish Sea and there are numerous ancient stories, once well known to its people, about land offshore that became submerged … and even about times when it was not an island, when it was connected to one of the nearby mainlands.
Tradition holds that the Isle of Man was formed when the giant Fionn flung a handful of soil at the giant Benandonner, as he was returning home across the Irish Sea to Scotland, ripping up the flagstones of the causeway he had built as he went. More on the antics of these two giants – and how science can interpret them – here.
Around the Isle of Man, there are many traditions about submerged islands. From one of these, remains of ruined buildings were occasionally brought up in fishing nets. Manx traditions also mention the existence of a sunken land off the island’s coast, where ‘sailors assert that they frequently hear cattle lowing, dogs barking, beneath the waves’. It is plausible to suppose that such memories represent echoes of a once much larger body of stories recalling when sea level was lower around the Isle of Man and it was contiguous with adjacent landmasses.
And there at least one story recalling just this, a time when the Point of Ayre on the Isle of Man was contiguous with the Mull of Galloway on the Scottish mainland 40 km away, something that could last have been true just over ten thousand years ago. This means that, if this story is an authentic memory of a time when such a land connection really existed, then it has been passed down orally in intelligible form for this length of time, first written down (it seems) only in the 1830s.
If you are sceptical that information can be conveyed orally for such an incredibly long time, then consider that your scepticism is probably influenced to some degree by the fact you are literate. And literate people tend to accept the superiority of the written word over the spoken one, but that is a judgement usually based on a lack of understanding of oral communication in pre-literate societies. As explained in my recent books, The Edge of Memory (2018) and Worlds in Shadow (2021), both beautifully published by Bloomsbury.
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