Let’s start with the coastal town of Sligo (County Sligo, Republic of Ireland), the name of which (in Irish, Sligeach) means “the place of shells”, a clear reference to the marine origins of the site. Most of Sligo Town occupied a (shelly) coastal barrier between the Atlantic Ocean and Lough Gill – see picture below.
Within Lough Gill, ancient stories recall there lies a “fairy city” with ‘magnificent streets and buildings’, something explainable by the once‐widespread belief that ‘the original town of Sligo … stood on a plain now overspread by the waters of Lough Gill, and that the islets studding the bosom of the lake are the crests of verdant knolls which formerly adorned its green expanse’.
Similar traditions are found in many parts of the world, some highlighted in my 2021 book Worlds in Shadow, and are considered likely to recall the gradual submergence of the land (as sea level rose after the last ice age) and the associated drowning of once-inhabited places. Sligo is featured in a recent article in the journal Geoarchaeology on this topic.
Such a tradition also applies to the submerged parts of former Sligo Town, where around the year 1900 a boatman was asked if he had ever seen any buildings beneath the waters of Lough Gill; ‘“In troth, I have”, was the ready answer, “and shure, on a still summer’s day, won’t you see the smoke from the chimneys rising straight up in the air from the surface of the lake?”’ – this is from page 221 of W.G. Wood-Martin’s (1902) book, Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland, which you can read free online here. Thanks to Archive.Org for the great support.
Our instinct is often to ridicule such stories because we know they cannot be true. But that misses the point. These stories represent oral traditions, passed on across the generations in societies where none could read or write, that used common everyday referends to support the truth of old stories about land being submerged; without those referends, the chances are that audiences would increasingly dismiss these ancient stories, which represent history and memory.
Similar stories elsewhere in the British Isles reference the tolling of undersea bells to authenticate ancient stories of land submergence. These kinds of stories are common in East Anglia, places like Aldeburgh and Dunwich, but also in Cardigan Bay (Wales) in places like Aberdyfi. They are similar to Fijian (South Pacific) stories of mosquitoes buzzing and torches flaring on sunken lands, stories narrated in Worlds in Shadow. But they are also similar to stories of merfolk – mermaids and mermen – that are found all over the world, and represent not simply romantic inventions, but a vehicle for sustaining people’s memories of places and people lost to rising sea level. I am perhaps the only person to have written about mermaids for The Washington Post, an article you can read here.
Mermaids commonly feature in stories along the coast of County Sligo, suggesting that these may have evolved as land was gradually submerged here and memories of the associated people and places remained fresh in the minds of local residents. Some 80 km west of Sligo Town, there are stories about the ocean around Kid Island (County Mayo) that recall people living on the sea floor as they once did on the land.
Further south, in Liscannor Bay (County Clare), there are stories about a submerged island named Kilstuithin, ‘an enchanted fort under the sea’ that, in a story from the year 1750, periodically becomes visible ‘surrounded by a wall of water’. Other formerly oral traditions about Kilstuithin tell how it was either once home to a cattle thief, who, in a scuffle, lost the ‘key’ to the island, which sank beneath the waves or, more prosaically, to the island’s king, who dropped the key in battle.
The great collector of oral traditions from western Ireland, Thomas Johnson Westropp, recalls how he heard ‘a pretty tale’ in the area in 1878 about how ‘boatmen at times smelt the wild thyme of the flowery fields’ of the submerged island as they rowed over the place where it lay, going on to ask whether it is ‘too daring to conjecture that [this story] rests on a firm historic basis?’ Part of Westropp’s motivation for this rhetorical question was his observation that ‘the whole coast [of western Ireland] gives many traces of submergence during untold ages’ and that ‘our legends are full of it’.
Further south again, in Ballyheigue Bay (County Kerry) there is a story of another submerged island. It is said that Ballyheigue Bay ‘at a remote period was overflowed in one of the encroachments which the Atlantic has made on that part of the coast of Kerry … fishermen declare they have often seen the ruined walls of an old chapel beneath them in the water’. One story holds that when any member of the Cantillons, the local squirearchy, died, their body would be placed on the shore and carried by their spirit ancestors to the island for burial. Yet one day, breaking protocol, a man sought to witness this, so the island was sunk as punishment. A variant on this story is that one of the Cantillons once married a ‘sea‐princess’ who died young and was buried on the island, her grieving father ordering the waves to ‘cut its roots’ and submerge it ‘beneath the grey and endless deep’. The story can be readily interpreted as a memory of the former encroachment of the sea across the land.
Comparable stories come from islands in Solomon Islands and Vanuatu (southwest Pacific Ocean), where vengeful parents/spouses are said to have caused entire islands to disappear because of the reprehensible behaviour of persons with whom they were associated. You could look at pages 239-243 of my 2021 book, Worlds in Shadow, for the terrifying story of proud Pae and the way his people on the island of Kuwae in Vanuatu teased, leading Pae to seek an irrational vengeance.
Recent analyses suggest that all the stories noted above originated when people observed land loss in these places more than five thousand years ago and committed their observations to memory. Through time, these memories were passed on, especially within the tight-knit Celtic communities living along the Atlantic fringe of Ireland, and have reached us today in a form we can understand.
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