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Actually, the sea level rise at the end of the last ice age is now thought by many to have taken weeks and is associated with extreme tsunami in the Atlantic Basin.
It is possible that they could both be true. The island slowly went under overtime but they noticed it happening and tried to fight it off and then they got hit by a wave which swamped everything inside of their defensive walls and made it pointless to try and save anymore
I don't know how you do your videos, just found your channel today, but I would love to hear a dissection on Vortigern and Saint Vortimer. They always struck me as the most historically valid of the old Arthurian related stories and I don't know if this is just me falling for bad stories or if they truly were real.
Sunken kingdoms, missing kingdoms, Arthurian connections, Ancient Celtic tribes, Wales is so much more interesting then people give it credit for, thank you for sharing these cool stories and legends from Wales, they are all fascinating!
The who,e of Britain is ‘Celtic’ although in antiquity nobody used the term. The so called English are typically 65-70% Brythonic and 30-35% Germanic! And the same is true for the so called Scots. So we have an interlinked history. Some of the Welsh histories take place in London, while the Welsh collection known since Lady Guest as the Mabinogion includes myths set in Gloucester. The imagined battles of Arthur include ones which would be in England. There’s a long Welsh poem called Y Gododdin which features an epic battle between the warriors of Edinburgh and those of the former Roman base at Catterick, now ‘Angles’. Wales is what is left of Brythonic ruled Britain.
Here in northern germany we have a similar story, the legend of the sunken city of Rungholt. Rungholt was once the richest town in the north sea, but it's people grew arrogant and greedy and so were punished when a great flood sank the entire city beneath the waves, though it is said that when the tide is low one can still hear churchbells ringing in the deep... This story was long thought if as just that, a story. The atlantis of the north sea. But it turned out that Rungholt and its fall were very much real. The city appears on old maps and even some remains were found during low tide, and while the town might not have had goldplated roofs it likely was quite wealthy, and in a strange twist even the story of how arrogance and greed caused the citys ruin might have some truth to it as the towns people were harvesting peat, which destabilized the ground, and when a great storm came the city and most of the island it sat on were devoured by the sea.
There's a similar Dutch legend - not surprising! The rich city of Saeftinghe in Zeeland. As with Rungholt, they were punished for their greed and pride.
And for this video quite fitting is the legend of Ys, a city in brittanny which was protected by its great walls before the princess charged with protecting the floodgates was seduced by the devil into opening them with the resulting deluge swallowing the entire city with only the king surviving.
I can see why Tolkien was so inspired by Welsh history, language, and myth. Everything is so old, and deep, and mysterious. It’s the kind of place where ancient oaks live in the graves of kings, and stories are written in the very wind.
Its not just tolkien who is inspired by us either. As someone who speaks fluent Welsh i can honestly tell you I understand more of the elven language in The Witcher series than I do our sister language Cornish. Geralt’s name even comes from the Welsh name Gerallt. As does his elven name of Gwynbleidd. Gwyn being white, bleidd being derived from blaidd - wolf.
Some psychological whiplash for me is that comparatively speaking, the Welsh mythos aren't really that old. they FEEL old though. Like Alexander the Great would be older to the Britons at the time of Anglo-Saxon invasion than the Britons are to us. We are far close in time to the original myths of Arthur than we are to the Roman emperors. Yet, the ancient Mediterranean world seems so close because we see its legacy everyday and we have primary sources everywhere. Celtic history has been so lost and fragmented that it feels like a half-remembered dream from eons ago.
Tolkien was inspired by old English. Hence why he wrote futhorc in his books and the homeland was called the shire. Though. Welsh and English become 1 at some point in history. Prydain.
@@wheat-is-an-ugly-drug not that long ago all things considering, the word that became Wales and Welsh came from the Anglo-Saxons might have meant outsider/not one of us, and would have been used for anyone native to the British Isles, or at least not of Anglo-Saxon descent, there was also treaties between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to not aggravate the native British Tribes in the East-Midlands area.
As a linguist, a T transforming over time to S is not impossible. They are both voiceless alveolars, which basically means they have the same place of articulation when you pronounce them and you don't use your voice when pronouncing them. The only difference between the two is the movement of air from the vocal tract. The T is a stop, meaning minimal air is moving out of the vocal tract. The ancient Welsh T may have been aspirated at the beginning of a syllable and over time "weakened" to a sibilant S, the opposite of a stop. So the idea that Teithi Hen may have changed over time to Seithenhin is absolutely plausible.
Add in dubious dentition, with a lisp to a pronuciation, and it really isn't a stretch to imagine the one turning into the other, or vice versa, over time.
It's not difficult to imagine costal settlements, dealing with seasonal and tidal floods, would, over generations, build a series of weirs and levies to hold back the typical inundation. (Imagine modern-day New Orleans but on a smaller scale.) However, when that tsunami or 500-year storm hits, it washes away the weirs and levies, resulting in immediate and catastrophic destruction of lands at or slightly below sea level by violent inundation.
We saw it happen with Fukushima. They had barriers for tsunamis, but there was (likely it seems) an underwater landslide tsunami triggered by the earthquake, which also itself triggered another tsunami. The two combined for one of those once-in-500-years events. If we didn’t have the records and science and instant communication and infrastructure we do today, it could easily have just been entirely wiped out and a legend of a village once there that was wiped into the sea. I agree that this is what we are likely seeing with these kingdoms.
By the weirs, I wonder if they were trying to build land by capturing sediment from the rivers and fill in the area from the main shore to the islands, and the purpose of inhabiting the islands with "kingdoms" was a way of keeping people on that task. The maintenance of the retaining walls would be essential. The sandbar at the river outlet reminds me of the Louisiana shoreline, where people used to build up land with the sediments of the Mississippi river. But much of this has stopped now that the river waters are being taken up and the flow has decreased. Not enough sediment is reaching the shoreline of the Gulf and Louisiana is now being washed away substantially. I wonder if there wasn't much more land in these seas in the AD eras, protected from storms and tsunamis by a lush growth of rushes. It would be a great place for aquaculture (fish farming!) Maybe in the 6th century this is something they're trying to hang onto or rebuild from their ancient memories. A booming economy fallen prey to an encroaching sea. A loss of manpower and population to the slave trade.
As a dutchman, my soul resonates with the lost welsch. We have in living memory lost (and reclaimed!) large swatN9,ches of land to subsiding lands and storm tides overwhelming ancestral dikes and levies... some lands remain under the waves though. Estuaries are quite prone to these floods and the soft silt of estuary islands are easy prey to the rage of poseidon.
I went to Aberystwyth University studying Geography, we were told about the Sarn Cynfelyn causeway and a legend that the bells of Cantre’r Gwaelod can sometimes be heard from the coast, which inspired a song called Clychau Aberdyfi. In Aberdovey they have a bell under the pier that rings at high tide to celebrate the legend. We took tree cores from the submerged forest at Borth / Ynyslas the trees are 4,000 - 5,000 years old and were submerged around 3,000 years ago from my memory, Ynyslas is also interesting as during WW2 they performed rocket tests there.
I might sound like an idiot here but reading "Clychau Aberdyfi" made me wonder if these legends are what inspired Lovecraft when coming up with is Cthullu mythos?
@@nevreiha Pretty sure it's the naming convention or 'language'. Welsh language and it's transcription sound and look very 'alien' to the most of... hmm... Europe.
Never knew about the rocket tests from Ynyslas! Knew Tywyn played somewhat of a part in the war effort with using the coast and dunes as a landing ground for amphibious assaults, but I thought that was pretty much it for that area of Wales. Learn something new everyday!
I was reminded of the town of Rungholt in North Frisia, in modern Germany, which sank beneath the waves of the North Sea in a storm tide in 1362. If anything it proves that it is definitely possible for some destructive cataclysm to cause an entire settlement to be lost to the sea.
A somewhat similar thing happened in Jutland, in 1825 a storm cut off the northern part and technically turned it into an island however given the historical precedent no one really considers it an island and it's treated as part of the Jutland peninsula. It's an interesting example of a major geographic change in recent history where popular imagination still hasn't really caught up with reality.
The flooding of 1362 is known as The Great Man-drowning (referring to people rather than men) in Danish History, and based on earlier maps resulted in the loss of quite a bit of land around the south-western part of Jutland, between the islands of Fanø, Mandø and Rømø, or most of the Danish Wadden Sea area. It isn't unlikely that the rest of the Wadden Sea saw similar permanent loss of land.
Frisia (Friesland) has a history of dikes. (Pumping the water out to make more land...etc.) Though I will admit I don't know if that comes from Dutch settlers or not. Idk. Point is, if a dike broke then they could easily lose a landmass. Side note, I've always found it interesting that what was Friesland is divided between the Dutch and Germans. With the Dutch portion still maintaining a degree of independence. (Passports, language, and killing anyone who called them Dutch till mid 1800s.)
@@chetw3139 wtf you're wrong in every sentence. The dikes were not by Dutch settlers at all. And the division is only between what currently is the Netherlands and Germany, it was not formally divided between two nations. While the language thankfully is fought for, the passports were just a joke from a few years back, and not taken serious.
Wales trying to not lose a kingdom to fleeting memories every 5 minutes (impossible) On a more serious note though, I wasn't initially interested in welsh history, but as a former non subscriber, this is the 3rd video I've seen from you(except the king arthur one) where Wales has lost a kingdom(mythical or not) to obscurity, which isn't a lot, but it's weird it's happened thrice.
I'm glad you're interested in Welsh history now, and I agree it's very strange and pretty comical how often it has happened! I've covered the three most famous ones with the completion of this video, but there are a bunch more believe it or not.
It's a long time, a lot of upheaval (rise and fall of the Romans), plus the shrinking of a culture from a large proportion of the UK to just Wales. Imagine tales being told about Newcastle, only remembered by people who lived their lives in Maidstone, Kent. I do wonder how many tales about "Wales" are about the whole of Britain, with a cultural memory of a larger Celtic area. It's a shame England lost so much of its Celtic culture, but wonderful that Wales retained it.
It's probably safe to assume that Wales isn't actually unusual in this regard and the rest of Europe and possibly the world is also littered with lost kingdoms. There's definitely some evidence of that in Denmark, the country is usually dated to the 930s with the reign of Gorm the Old but Frankish Chronicles mention a Danish king from the 800s. There's also a very rich tomb on Funen which possibility housed some sort of king but also was raided during the reign of Gorm the Old, not for its riches, lots of them can still be found, but to remove the body of whoever was buried there, seemingly with the intention of removing them from history in some symbolic way. What does make Wales stand out is that unlike much of the rest of post-Roman Europe we have very extensive sources from it, I'm guessing because it was already Christian and thus there was a clergy to preserve written history and document events. That means that in the 21st century it is actually possible to discover these lost kingdoms because clear written accounts persist and we aren't solely reliant on archeology and outside sources like in much of the rest of Europe. Extrapolating from that is pure speculation but I can't help but wonder if Wales is just a window into what the Early Medieval World was like in general, like one of those rare fossils that preserve soft tissue from an extinct species giving us a valuable insight into what it was actually like.
To me this bears a striking rememblance of the area known as Doggerland which disappeared quite violently after a series of minor floodings from the glacial ices that melted.
They're actually part of the same ancient landmass, that was Britain and the area around it, forming a peninsula on the end of Europa during the last ice age. So it could very well be directly connected in their causes for disappearance too
Most of Doggerland took thousands of years to sink though, it was just the final remains that sunk due to either a massive storm or a tsunami. It doesn't really add up in time with the stories here. Yeah, this was land too when Doggerland was a thing but the stories make it clear that these islands were likely remain of sand and gravel the ice left when the last ice age ended and got eroded away by storms and maybe a tsunami. The English large city of Dunwich is far more similar here, it was once the third largest city in England but after a bunch of storms most of the land it stood on had fallen into the sea. The first half of the city fell during a massive storm which sounds more similar to this story. I don't think the story would have survived as well as it did for the over 5000 years since Doggerland sunk either. Dunwhich BTW sank in 1347 AD. Considering the stories, most of the land likely sunk somewhere between 300-900 AD even if up to 1200 is possible, and some sandbanks remained to the time the first map was drawn. But of course, a serious archaeological dig by underwater archaeologists should give us enough artifacts to date if the island in fact were occupied. Until then we are still just speculating.
a comment in here claimed that in one of the mentioned areas, the dead trees were dated to 3000 years ago. i have seen other documentaries used the same data so I'm assuming the 3000 years mark might be correct.
@@RoseNZieg 3000 years do sound plausible for one of the lost islands outside Wales. For Doggerland no, the dates there seems more to be around 8500 years and older. Do you know exactly where those samples are from? It is interesting and 3000 years would make it about 1500 years earlier from when the first stories were recorded which is plausible for a land with good traditions of oral history.
@@loke6664 i was going to comment that Dogger land sinking was very gradual but you already did it ^^ The comment about the sunken forest says this "We took tree cores from the submerged forest at Borth / Ynyslas the trees are 4,000 - 5,000 years old and were submerged around 3,000 years ago from my memory" 2000 y/o tress are not impossible but very uncommon, specially near settled areas, so unless I read the paper with the carbon dating to cofnirm it I would just take the age of "around 3000 years old" for the tress.
Ok so this is weird, but when i was younger my family had a caravan in Ceredigion. And when I was younger I used to have dreams about islands that would appear at mega low tides (were talking tides so low they don’t exist in the real world since it was a dream) and I would go over on boats and explore sunken kingdoms. Never knew there were actual sunken islands until today, bit of a weird coincidence.
I'll admit, I spent most of this video thinking about the Petrified Forest in Borth and Ynyslas. When that was discovered back in 2014, everyone had the same thing on their mind. Cantre'r Gwaelod was based on a real place! This was a hellishly good video. Adding some actual historical info to the bafflingly large amount of confusing mythology we've got here.
this might help ..... its guitneu ..not gwddno . thats the irish t there but pronounced "d" for regional variation ... yama o hyd ... i am here/(not beheaded ?) ..
@@Paul-tp9vfDiscovered for the public, things get found then forgotten usually or not published as a discovery which leads to people getting the credit or taking claim since they don’t know it’s been seen before
Geologist here! Very interesting video from the historic side but also from a geological standpoint, since as you conclude this is all likely based on actual landmasses that existed. I´m not familiar with the area at all, so I can only speak of generalities, but those glaciar rock deposits that streched into the sea happen both at the sides and at the front of the glacier, the result of the ice carrying forward (ice literally flows very slowly in glaciers) big chunks of rock when it freezes (picking them up or breaking the soil/rock underneath them) then dropping them when the ice melts (that´s why it happens at the front and sides of the glacier). Usually when the ice permanently retreats these deposits form natural barriers which often form a lake or lagoon protected from the sea, at least until the front deposit is eroded or covered by rising sea levels. When this happens the side deposits can still act as wave breakers and gradually trap sand/sediments from the ocean currents, even forming or expanding existing beaches. But one big storm can erode/wash away all this sand/sediment together with some of the heavier material of the old glacier deposit, making it impossible for the beach to form again since there glaciar deposit can no longer act as a wave breaker. It also can happen gradually of course but a storm fits more with the narrative mentioned in the stories as you say. I think the "lost islands" could easily have been those frontal glaciar deposits, which being further into the sea are more eroded and not visible at low tide today like the side ones. And at the same time people back then could have seen ample and flat beaches in the area for centuries just to wake up one day after a storm and see most of it gone, adding to the tale of a sunken kingdom. Also sorry for any crude or not scientific vocabulary, English is not my mother tongue so expressing ideas in it is sometimes hard ^^
I know nothing about Welsh history or even that much British history, but these videos on lost kingdoms and historical mysteries are amazing. Keep it up!
I was told a story by my grandmother, who was from Aberdyfi, who said that there was an old town of Aberdyfi under the waves offshore. When the wind and tide were in the right direction, you could hear the bells of the sunken Church.
Actually the most interesting historical UA-camr, no exceptions I have literally zero connection to wales, or the British isles, or even Western Europe, but this guy makes me love that place
Just an observation on Ynys Seiriol's previous English name of "Priest-holme". In Spanish, puffins are called "frailecillos", literally "little friars". There are several other languages where puffins are named for friars, deans and priests - could there be a connection between that and the island's previous English name?
More likely it was named for actual priests - according to tradition, St Seiriol moved to the island and became a hermit there after establishing the nearby Penmôn Priory in the sixth century, and there were later religious establishments on the island too, the remains of which can still be found.
@@KaiserMacClegyou could still have a connection. Perhaps when the Spanish visited the puffins would stand around listening to clergy preach giving rise to the name.
Let us point out, Monks & Pruests plopped themselves wherever the Indigenous Peoples had revered spiritual sites… so the idea that a Woman of Respondibilities lived somewhere, you can be assured the Catholic Church plunked into the spot
when I looked up Gwynn Ap Nudd and Gwyddno's sunken kingdom, I never realized just how deep into manuscripts, local legends, cartography, and historical events this story went into. That being said, I did find some interesting connections to other flooded lands associated with Brythonic language-speaking regions: the Kingdom of Lyonesse, usually said to be the homeland of Sir Tristan and located somewhere near Cornwall (altho wikipedia said the legend and even the name of Lyonesse isn't consistent); and the Breton legend of Ys, which sank underwater due to the machinations of the princes Dahut (kinda like how Mererid let Maes Gwyddno sink underwater). Gwynn Ap Nudd's random connection to Gwyddno is also interesting to me, mostly bc Gwynn is this psychopomp fairy king figure who's better known from 'Culwch and Olwen'
As someone who lives in Machynlleth I’ve always heard about Cantre’r Gwaelod being told to me growing up, this however has been the best so far. Hats off to you for bringing our amazing history and folklore to so many people. Makes my time exploring the old ruins and sights that bit more exciting.
Just imagine what other stories the ancient britons once had after seeing the petrified forest once the waves unveiled them. Perhaps a glimpse of the "Otherworld".
Folk memory is one of the most fascinating subjects for me, also the most maddening for the very same reasons I love it. It cannot ever be pieced together definitively, even with primary sources. However examining it makes us all have to reevaluate how much of history, be it recorded or not, is a matter of consensus not fact. Makes one appreciate what we know and challenge the definitiveness of that knowledge. The fact that so many historic kingdoms and figures could be several real events misconstrued, or any combination of them shows how much rides on the interpretation of whoever recorded the text we have. This is such a good example of how "corrections" can end up accidentally erasing greater context because historical writers often had to guess or work from biases just as we do. Great video
This is such a cool discovery to make. I’m from the Pacific Northwest in the USA, so learning welsh history on your channel had been a refreshing treat. Stuff like this makes me wish we still had more of the records and oral traditions of native groups across the Americas; imagine how many stories like this there must be here. The english and their colonial descendants really did mess everything up with their genocide and colonization. (Before anyone comes after me in the comments I know that American expansion and colonization was done by more Europeans than just the english).
A lot of the southern US explorers were actually Scottish, Irish or Welsh as they were the ones seeking to escape poverty. Can't blame it on the English. Also consider the french and Spanish quite literally owned large swathes of inland US and Pacific coast before the US itself started kicking out natives. British policies towards natives were to use them as trade opportunities for valuable resources unless aggression was displayed. American policies were to expand and monopolize the lands, removing natives through force if necessary. Blaming it on England is very silly considering a majority of the damage to Native Americans was after the US declared independence.
A storm in 2020 revealed fossilised trees under the sand at cardigan bay, being th remnants of the old forest. Lost kingdoms interests me so much, love your videos so well researched. If the history essays in uni were video format my degree would have been so much easier 😂👍 Anyone interested there's a podcast series called Fall of Civilizations which covers similar stories around the world.
I’m not sure how I would get in contact with you other than through your comment section but I would honestly do full Welsh translations of your videos for free. I’m a uni student doing performance and media in the university of Salford and I think talking about our people’s history in our native language would help with my hiraeth. I’m a huge fan of your videos and I wish you made videos whilst I was in school. Idk if they do but I hope they play these videos in schools and I think having a Welsh translation would be ideal for our local schools.
Oh wow, that'd be awesome! I've tried to use UA-cam's auto translate whilst correcting the occasional words/phrases, but my Welsh is nowhere near good enough lol. There's an email in my channel's 'about' section if you look at it on a computer, feel free to email me through there, then I could send you the script!
The lost kingdoms were collectively called 'y cantre gwaelod' (bottom homes of hundreds) and we're said to exist between the Western coast of wales and eastern coast of Ireland. Pwyll embarrassing himself chasing rhiannon was said to take place in these lands aswel as the explanation that bendigeidfran somehow walked to Ireland to rescue his sister. Never heard of 'Ynys teithi hen' though, it's interesting that it translates to 'island of old homes'. The wars around this time between everybody supposedly explains the original rivally between the northern highlanders(gogledd/gogs) and the southern lowlanders that still exists today in Wales. Please consider I was taught this in school so I'm going off childhood memorys. Interesting stuff separating fact from fiction.
Very thoughtfully put together presentation thank you! When I worked in Nottinghamshire I was told a story which shows that legends and myths preserved for millennia can hold kernels of truth: A man who had worked in construction all his life told me of a small lake which had always been associated with the rumour that Roman treasure was at the bottom of the lake. I believe this was in the East Midlands somewhere. Many people had tried dredging and exploring the depths but nothing was found so it was considered a myth. Eventually a new bypass was to be built and the lake had to be drained and excavated to make the major road. A small boy discovered gold items on the excavation site and other locals came, taking some gold items home. When the authorities found out, the locals were made to bring it all back! They eventually indeed discovered a hoard of Roman treasure which is now in the British Museum and one of the more valuable finds discovered in Britain!
As someone who loves history of ancient kingdoms, I can see where Tolkien's masterpiece was inspired from. Discovering history is a fascinating journey, your visuals and storytelling are mesmerising. Thank you.
@@phillippevictor I haven't been there but I bet it's a beautiful place. Tolkien must have been inspired by remote places with lost stories like this. Thanks for your feedback 🙏🏻
These stories are so similar to the story of the lost land of Lyonnesse off the coast of Cornwall which I studied at university. I live in Oregon on the west coast of the US and we have a sunken petrified forest on one of our beaches. It disappears and reappears depending upon the weather. I wonder if our local tribes have any legends related to it. I’ll need to look that up. Anyway, very informative video! I love how much research you put into these!
Maybe the cataclysm of around 536 AD caused a change in the Welsh coastline. Poorly documented as it was in Roman times, the loss of a string of major coastal settlements, possibly already ravaged by coastal incursions would have then been buried by what happened to those that survived as they emerged from the accompanying climactic disaster. Fantastic video btw, thank you.
On the coast road to Drommore (South west Scotland) the road goes past a house by the sea, it used to be a farm with fields out the front of it until one night and an horrendous storm, in the morning they found all the fields had just been washed away, the family had lost their animals and land in one night, today there is nothing to tell it was there, so the islands off the Welsh coast may have had a similar fate. The farms fate although having happened a good while ago was still within living memory when I first heard about it.
There are similar accounts on the West Coast of Guernsey from c. 6th or 7th century of a tidal wave inundating Vazon Bay. After a decent storm, the sand is scoured back and you can see the tree trunks and forest floor exposed. I was surprised at how recent it was.
My wife divorced me, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and I lost both my arms today. But Cambrian Chronicles uploaded so I’d say it’s been a pretty good day
Ok, having published on post-glacial sea level in Great Britain I will say the following: It's not just ocean levels rising but land subsidence that causes relative sea level rise in the southern Irish Sea. This is an ongoing consequence of post-glacial viscoelastic relaxation. A tsunami event should be detectable in sedimentary records from the relevant river beds. Tsunamis carry clearly distinct debris up the river and deposit it as a distinctive layer. There is an example of this style of feature in the Firth of Forth.
I grew up in St Davids. In Saint Brides bay theres an ancient forest and village 3 miles off the coast. Ive personally walked over the petrified timbers of the forest at rare lle tides.
Im from south wales and as someone that is obsessed with history ive never heard of this, thank you for educating me on this topic. I will most definitely be looking more into this topic..Great video
Interesting video. Just one small note: "Low water spring" doesn't mean " the low tides of spring," it means "a low spring tide." Springs are a part of the tidal cycle where the tidal range is most extreme (the opposite being neaps). A low spring tide is the lowest tide normally experienced in the area, confusingly it has nothing to do with the season. I suspect it was named after the biblical assumption that tides were caused by "fountains of the deep." I really loved watching this because I'm fascinated by sunken lands. It blows my minds that fishermen on the dogger bank come back with neanderthal skulls and tiger bones and that you can just sail across what used to be fertile valleys and farmland.
Ah ok, thank you for the correction! I though "low water spring" looked a bit odd, but once source mentioned how you can best see the sarnau during the low tides of spring after winter storms, so I figured it must be the seasons haha
I’m from Dinbych and travel all over North Wales, so know all these place you are on about. I watch so so many niche history channels yet have never discovered yours. How I have taken so long to find this channel is unbelievable. Wow. Great video.
Great detailed research as always! Wales has so many interesting legends and stories. Now I have to plan another trip to wales despite the fact that I just came back from one!
I find this channel when I seeking information about celtic languages. This channel is like treasure to me. No one talk about celts in his channel, but finally I found this!
I have started watching this stuff about a year ago and man, these stories and videos are ma favourite. I will likely start adapting these into my RPG games and worlds that I run as GM with my friends. Thanks a lot for making this detailed stuff and I cant wait to see what more historical mysteries you uncover.
Fascinating! Being on the other side of the country in Suffolk, we have our fair share of land lost to the sea: Dunwich and, of course, Dogger Land being the most notable. Although you did a thorough job unravelling the story, it's so complicated I'll need to watch it again, to follow the trail.
Easton ness just north of Southwold too, further east than Lowestoft's Ness point in the C16-17th. Shipden ness off Cromer. Watched hundreds of meters of land fall into the sea here over 60 years. Recently learned of a major medieval "port" at the mouth of the Deben in medieval times, the port of Goseford, not a town itslef but a collection of wharfs across several villages & different creeks at the mouth of the deben.They being Bawdsey, Alderton, Kirton & others. It was mentioned on a par with Gt Yarmouth & Kings Lynn, mentioned even when Dunwich was not. Bit OT from Wales, but my wife was half Welsh too.
First of all thanks for the great content. As others mention in the comments, storms are entirely capable of destroying Islands. In 1362 a storm tide completely swept away large parts on the coast of Friesland (now the wadden sea in the border area between Denmark and Germany) including the allegedly large and thriving city of Rungholt. Though there are no maps from this time that can really be trusted, remains of Rungholt have been found and it is clear that the storm tide did indeed change coastal landscape of the entire wadden sea region of modern day Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.
You refer to historically recorded events. With Doggerland dissapearing 'only' 6.500 years ago, and lots more lands gone from the coasts of now Germanic speaking regions, since they became Germanic speaking, you'd think there'd be a body of legends in the Germanic languages refering to them. I'm not aware of such legends.
But that belongs to a more flat type of landscape than the one of Wales: a storm surge can devastate and even destroy an island that is barely above sea level, what is characteristic of Friesland and the Netherlands, but hardly do anything to the rocky coastal landscape of Wales.
@@LuisAldamiz I should start by saying i am no expert in this at all. You are of course right about that - a single storm will hardly have the least effect on a rocky coast. Though islands formed by build up of sand in the outlet of rivers (as seems to be the case in the video) might be a different matter - especially with the added effect of gradually rising sea levels. Of course all such claims should be based on sound scientific data, not some guy speculating from his couch (me). My point is simply that the lack of recorded volcanic/seismological activity does not necessarily exclude the sudden disapperance of these islands.
@@drychaf I'm not an expert in this by any means, but as far as I know, the end of Doggerland is usually estimated to be a bit earlier than that, somewhere between 7000 and 8000 years ago. And, at least in terms of the impact on humans in the area, it was likely not a single disastrous event but rather a gradual process where the landscape slowly turned into salty marshes over a long period of time, killing off the local flora and fauna. Since the human societies in the region at this time were, to the best of my knowledge, all hunter-gatherers (the Neolithic Revolution wouldn't reach the area for another couple of centuries), they would have followed the animals and plants into more hospitable regions long before the area sank below sea level. The gradual loss of familiar hunting grounds would have been disruptive but far less traumatic than the sudden destruction of a settlement that had been thriving in the same place for centuries, so it might not necessarily have left an easily recognisable trace in local legends.
this is a good representation of one of modern archaeology's more perplexing challenges. our ancestors flocked to coasts for sustenance since before our form of hominid existed and sea levels have risen enormously since those times, so there are probably alot of important prehistoric sites under the waves and funding for finding, let alone excavating, these sites is non-existent.
i was recommended this channel recently, and am going back and watching all of your videos, in order, and i feel compelled to tell you how much i appreciate the captions on your videos. honestly, they're such a huge help to me, as i attempt to digest the information being presented, so thank you so much!
You're welcome! They're no trouble at all to make, and I use them frequently myself when they exist. I wish more creators would make them, UA-cam will literally do it for you if you import your script, it's so easy
Surprised that you didn’t mention that the (almost) exact same story exists and is popular in French Britanny, as the drowned city of Ys. Obviously the legend was brought by the Britons and relocalized there, but it means the story is at least older than the 5th century.
I wanted to originally but I couldn't fit it into the already long script. Ys is super interesting although it's also extremely similar to the story of Gwyddno, it may be based on an older story but it's also entirely possible that it was inspired from Cantre'r Gwaelod
@@jaredriddle8320 Perhaps, though the Romans named Paris after the Parisi. That would mean the Parisi would have taken their name from a different lost settlement by that name.
People do not understand how much of our history we have lost to the sea and to the oceans. Portugal has lots of potential cases but no one exists here to study them except me and a few academics.
I'm sure someone has already said this but this reminds me of the Minoan eruption in the 16th century BCE that destroyed the Minoan settlements on the island that is now known as Santorini. It is also believed (as far as I am aware) that there were more islands forming the caldera around the volcano prior to this eruption but that several of them 'sunk' due to the eruption and it's effects. This is something that is thought to have inspired the idea of Atlantis. Which I find crazy as it shows how strong folk memory is and how there are a lot of these similar stories around the world that all have a little grain of truth to them when you dig deep!
The island of Santorini in ancient times was known as Thera. A lot of people that prescribe to Atlantis being a real place put it as Thera/Santorini. I actually believe 'Atlantis' is similar to this, a folk memory that has become an allegory.
There are also the ancient Greek colony of Dioscurias (Sebastopolis, modern Sukhumi) slowly sinking beneath the Black Sea, and the year 365 Crete earthquake which sunk a part of Alexandria and is recorded in Roman history.
Seithenhin and Mererid are the really interesting characters here. They are clearly recognisable. Seithenhin would have been quite outspoken, which would be why the stories are remembered. He'd have put a lot of effort into spreading them. Mererid would have been his muse. The hallmarks are there. She is the unrequited love. As the seas threatened the island, he would no doubt have spoken of the danger and tried to warn people, but found that his warnings fell on deaf ears. Mererid's ears would have been the most deaf of all, and he would have grown immensely frustrated at her, and when his warnings, unheeded, came true as the sea claimed the islands, that would have stoked his annoyance at her. He is a similar character to Lancelot in the Arthurian legends, and she would have been his Guinevere. Following the cataclysm, he'd have probably become more philosophical about the whole affair, and would have been more like Galahad, or possibly Gawain. He was someone to whom the spirit of the sea spoke, as the lady of the lake spoke to the Arthurian knights. This story has water sprite written all over it.
One thing that immediately came to mind was the name Mereid and how closely it resembles Nereides, the Greek minor goddesses of the oceans. Her actions as described also parallel this hypothetical connection, as does her later disappearance from the narrative in subsequent versions, as the clerics recording the tales would be reluctant to speak about the role of a pagan deity in the sinking of the lands.
@@gwynedd4023 Not looking for a direct connection between the two words (I’m not a linguist so I’m not qualified to speak on the relationship between the two words); but her “job title” and how she caused the flooding are both nonsensical in a secular context, but likewise both make sense if she is a minor water deity/water spirit, like a Nereid.
i am not at all familiar with wales or the welsh language, and this video was difficult for me to follow because welsh is such a foreign language to me, but it was fascinating and i am now subscribed to learn more about wales! :)
So glad that you also found the Haslett and Willis paper and a well presented video. One way to understand how soft and easy to erode the material that made up these islands is to look at an area like Llanon ,where unconsolidated glacial deposits underlie the land, on the National Library of Scotland site to see how in about 100 yrs the low lying cliff has moved back about 100 metres. If islands in Bae Ceridigion where made of similar material anchored to the Sarnau with sand bars and peat marsh to the rear (like Borth Bog) then it is easier to imagine then being overwhelmed in a catastrophe. The sea in the intervening time eroding the previous land surface to a wave cut shelf. The Sarnau being more resistant with boulder clay holding the bars together to this day. The tree stumps at Ynyslas, Borth are best viewed at low spring tides after winter storms. You need to produce these for a TV audience as well, a real skill.
Brilliant video on stuff I never knew about. Love exploring early Welsh Middle Ages mystery lore. Can’t wait for your next video suggestions. I’d love it if you did more on the Silures from your Celtic tribes video. Why they were so resistant to the Romans keeping them out of South Wales for so long and how they were defeated.
I just gotta say I love what you do man. I have no connection to the British Isles or even Europe (being Mexican), but ever since I started listening to the British History Podcast I've been fascinated with the old Britons and Wales. I wonder if making videos about Strathclyde and the other Northern British kingdoms is something you would ever do. I'm absolutely fascinated with how Alt Clud/Strathclyde manage to survive so far into the medieval age, yet with so little information about them around to read outside of academic papers.
in the early 90's in school I learned about this and did a few projects about the tale of Bae Ceridigion, Cantre Gwaelod and stories in the Mabinogi. One of my earliest memories.
Excellent video. I was struck by the parallels with the Breton story of the Kingdom of Ys (Kêr Ys). As you no doubt know, this involves a King Gralon who rules over a coastal city protected from the rising sea by a dike. The kingdom is then flooded when his daughter, Dahut, opens the dike (her reasons vary depending on the account, but in at least in some versions she became drunk while feasting with her lover). The kingdom is then engulfed by the sea and disappears beneath the waves. It seems clear that these two stories come from the same tradition… Was this a story that British migrants brought with them during their medieval migration into the Armorican Peninsula? Or did it develop later in Brittany based on Welsh inspiration?
Lyonesse too, in Cornwall, another land which was once protected by dykes, lost beneath the sea in a single night. I find it hard to believe that all these stories, so close to each other geographically, could have sprung up independently from one another. Must be the same story, surely, each place with its own version.
I was originally going to include some parallels with the related stories such as Ys, but in the end it seemed to derail the video a bit, I’ll probably cover them in the future. As for the similarities, I only did some light research, but it seems like the story of Ys comes about quite a bit later than the story of Gwyddno. And as they are so similar, it was likely based on Gwyddno’s tale, perhaps brought over by the Britons like you said
It's interesting to hear of folk stories passed down for so many generations. Here in Australia, the indigenous people have stories that reflect events from over 10,000 years ago. It's absolutely mind-boggling to think that campfire stories can be told for such long periods of time and not have lost all the original context.
I find it sad that the Blackwells in Edinburgh only has one tiny little row of books in the corner about Welsh History or Literature. There is no Arthurian Legend either. Makes me wonder if no consumers are interested because I think they should be?
@@CambrianChronicles it’s sad because England has an entire room just for certain periods and then Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Ireland have almost nothing. I’m aware English history is huge but so are the other countries. They are all equally important.
I just discovered this channel. I loved Wales/Cymru ever since I visited in 2000 and I bought the New Cambridge Medieval History series just to read more about it. You're doing fantastic work so keep it up. I'm looking forward to learning more.
Wow thank you so much, that means a lot! Not to gush but your posts on r/Newtubers were/are some of the most helpful resources I've had in growing my channel, so thank you again
Hello from England, my Welsh cousin. I'm a little late to this party, but as this video appeared in my timeline, I thought I would watch and listen; I am so pleased that I did. I found this fascinating. What I liked most was the pronunciation of Welsh names, which I attempted to pronounce (mostly incorrectly by quite some margin) before the commentator. 'dd' is pronounced as 'th', how thoroughly interesting. I'm now hooked, and you have a new subcriber. Thank you for posting this. I've just noticed to the right, there's a suggested video on King Arthur whose legend I believe I am quite well versed on. I expect to be corrected and look forward to it. :)
A day when you upload another video is truly a very happy day! I genuinely appreciate all the effort you put towards your videos, they are so incredibly fascinating and make my day.
It's funny how we obsess with coastal erosion and saving beach front houses, but historically we've lost entire regions. Walton-on-the-Naze over on the east of England is a 'replacement' Walton for one that is now 9 miles out to sea.
Recently discovered your channel, and am binging it! I love it. As someone who is proud of my welsh heritage, and with a deep family connection to north wales, I have always been fascinated by Celtic/Britonic lore and myth. Keep them coming,
As a resident of Aberystwyth i can confirm there are no islands however if you look at a nautical map for depth you'll see that land has been swallowed up but the seabed is very flat and shallow in a very localised way once you get 10 meters out... possibly two peaks from either side of a valley... The nautical map and geography suggests there was land or islands... at one point the far out sea is 2 meters deep but 12 meters deep close to the shoreline... peaks and valleys would still be a feature and the beach is made of slate but surrounding beaches are made of sand... the existing valley to the rear of Aberystwyth if extended out would form the two islands in about the same place...
Right, the areas between Aberystwyth and Aberdyfi is Borth, and as a matter of fact in 2014 during a very low tide i stood on the stumps of an ancient woodlands, huge stumps of what resembled bog wood, but since they have instaled tidal protection the sand has increased and buried it all, so at some point before the sea level had ether risen or the land had sunk. But it's a fact, and i personally stood in that woodland.
A magnificent summary of what was probably, but may not have been. And yet I find myself believing in a folk memory, because little else makes sense. Thank you for the summary - very much appreciated.
Really glad you did such a deep dive into this stuff. If you're looking for other singular dramatic events that could bring about a sudden destruction, look into Phillip Runggaldier's Llyn Llion theory, of the bursting of a glacial lake in the Irish Sea, which if shown to be true bears remarkable similarity to legends. Note that Runggaldier is an amateur, and while I tend to agree with his geological argument which is in his area of expertise, he really confuses his ideas on the historical front, and I'm doubtful that his proposed event could have been preserved in such specific detail for over 13000 years. But it's very stimulating stuff.
I love the idea of lost knowledge and events being passed down unknowingly through old stories and oral tradition. It makes me wonder how old could the oldest stories, phrases, or even words be.
Indeed! It’s super interesting, the Mabinogion in general is a great resource for seeing how old memories have been passed down, but a 3000+ year old memory of the Irish Sea being shallower is definitely my favourite
There's a study of oral stories from coastal aboriginal people of Australia that match to sea rises of 7-10 thousand years ago! Also the 7 sisters stars (Pleiades?) were only visible as separate 7 stars thousand(s?) years ago. (2 are too close nowadays to see as 7 stars by the naked eye).
I had a walk out as far as possible on Sarn Cynfelyn at the lowest tide of the year, and it was quite strange being so far away from the land surrounded by sea, looking back at the coastline a fair distance away.
There was, in fact, a major tsunami that wiped out a lot of coastal Great Britain about 8,000 years ago. That’s along time, but it would definitely have been an event that could have had a lasting impact in oral history/legend. It was big enough to reach a mile inland in some locations, so coastal islands would certainly have been swamped. It was not caused by an earthquake, but by an undersea land slump in the North Sea.
One thing I think you missed or glossed over a bit. If the core story is old and wide spread, it would be quite common for people to at least locally have named places after the story. Like how small insignificant structures/geographical features can often locally get named after large historically or fictitious counterparts as a bit of a joke. Or even just as an embellishment to entertain children. Even if the origin of the story took place somewhere else completely, as long as the story had spread there. You could very well have had hundreds of local places named after the story, but only a couple ever being documented and fewer still remaining to this day.
Nearly all of those names are still in use in Iceland today. Not many people realize that Iceland was settled by Kelts, apparently Welsh-Kelts before the Vikings came here. Icelandic has many relics from Gaelic including a -ll sound that's pronounced like -tl whereas in the Scandinavian languages -ll is always pronounced softer without a click-blow sound like the Welsh/Icelandic -ll. Guthni is a rather common Icelandic name to this day
To anyone planning a sea passage to/from/past Aberystwyth, BEWARE : do not believe him when he says those two islands 'do not exist' ! There are several large rocky areas just below the sea surface at low tide in those areas that could seriously damage a keeled sailing ship, or anything with a significant draft passing over at low tides. Perhaps the 'islands' have no trees or habitations on, but they are there, and not easy to spot in fog....
The unbeknownst truth that most people are unaware of is that the Celtic/Gaelic language, especially the Welsh language is very similar to how Ancient Chaldean/Hebrew was phonetically spoken in contrast to the more recent "Yiddish" form of Hebrew. Modern hebrew does not sound anything like original Hebrew.
I always find Wales really interesting. A little over half my ancestry is Welch. My Grandfather's grandparents came from an area by a town called Monmouth. He can even speak a few word of welch. When I was younger he would tell me stories his grandparents told him about Wales. For context I am from a small town in the American West.
i used t live nr. there. tis v. pretty. Monmouth means 'mouth of the monnow' as it joins the Wye river at this point. worth a visit if ur ever in the u.k.
@@drychafFor years Welch and Welsh were used interchangeably in America. It is like Scots and Scotch or Deutsch and Dutch. Both of which are still used today (most notably Pennsylvania Dutch and Scotch-Irish.) After all, Welsh comes from the Saxon word for foreigner, if we are going by the names other people give to the Brythonic inhabitants of Cymru, how is one more "correct" than the other? Welsh, Welch, and Walsh all mean the same thing.
@@ulfskinn1458 Terms evolve. Today the standard English terms are Welsh, Scots and Dutch. From wiki: Many Scots dislike the term Scotch and some consider it offensive. As for Dutch and Deutsch, they are terms for two different languages and cannot be used interchangably without causing confusion. As much as I would prefer to be know as a Cymro (Welsh language for 'a Welshman'), in today's English, the term Welsh is the accepted term. Welsch is a relic. Terms evolve, and consistency aids clarity. The term is 'Welsh'.
@@drychaf Languages are fluid, living things and what is "standard" doesn't mean jack to most people's vernacular. No one truly speaks "standard English", it exists only as a literary language. I can tell you are not from America, but many people here still refer to something Scottish as "Scotch", especially in terms of ancestry. The ethnic group called Ulster-Scots in Northern Ireland are called Scotch-Irish in the US. The same goes for "Dutch," which commonly referred to Germans, not Hollanders (from Low German "Dütsch", meaning "Deutsch" or German.) The term is still used by people today to describe a colonial-era German identity. Finns from northern Minnesota are often called "Finlanders" despite the term not being "standard." And of course, in certain communities "Welch" refers to that ethnic group originating from around the Cambrian mountains in Western Britain. The point is that different people in different areas have different names for things, and touting some "standard" literary language as the "correct" way to speak or write is bizarre to me. Just because a number of urban intellectuals use certain words doesn't mean that they are somehow more "correct" than others. It's also especially weird when the term in question is a meaningless exonym in the first place.
Doggerland needs to be explored as well. Because of the sheer size and depth of it, that would be a massive, and decades, or century long dig, in itself. To say nothing of everywhere else on earth. Such as Adam's Bridge, otherwise known as Rama Setu, near Sri Lanka. Just as today, in the past, a disproportionate percentage and numerical amount of humanity seems to have preferred to live on the absolute edges of various coastlines around the world. This means, as the various ice ages ended, their settlements and ancient kingdoms were naturally swallowed up by the rising seas. Which means, we've been limiting our archeological studies to what was merely convenient, or technologically possible, given our limited technical capabilities, and limited funds. But as our technology improves, we can, and should, start digging and exploring our most comprehensive histories, which I am convinced lie just under the shallow oceans and seas, and lakes of the world. The bulk of humanity's history, and the most ancient of it, is not merely buried, it is submerged! We've only, heretofore, been studying the most convenient parts of it! Most of our most ancient legends lie underneath the waves. And we need to find and study them.
I stayed in a water front hotel in Aberystwyth, New Years 1985, and it is easy to believe the sea reclaimed land there. The wind was brutal and had already taken the far end of the street - many building inhabitable.
Not even closly related,but old Croatian folklore has an idea on how our islands were formed, some say that gigants were throwing the rock in to the sea,orhers laiter chaonged the story to God doing that.
its interesting that you mention a tsunami occuring at that time as ive heard of a similar event occuring in south Kerry Eire where a large lake was formed, in the process swamping a settlement now lost under the lake (Waterville lake). i had thought it just a story, but now im thinkin otherwise... Also, those ancient lost kindoms probably spent generations building up ramparts against the rising sea levels only t finally lose out to the cataclysm of a tsunami... a magnetic survey wd probably help... Great vid tho, thanx!
I am a great fan of old legends and the work of professor Tolkien and it's really interesting to hear about Taliesin and about the destruction of Beleriand in significantly more realistic/historical version.
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Thanks for watching, everyone. And thank you for your patience after this video was delayed by a few hours, I hope you all enjoy!
Actually, the sea level rise at the end of the last ice age is now thought by many to have taken weeks and is associated with extreme tsunami in the Atlantic Basin.
I'm confused.
@@CS-zn6pp 😦😦😦
It is possible that they could both be true. The island slowly went under overtime but they noticed it happening and tried to fight it off and then they got hit by a wave which swamped everything inside of their defensive walls and made it pointless to try and save anymore
I don't know how you do your videos, just found your channel today, but I would love to hear a dissection on Vortigern and Saint Vortimer. They always struck me as the most historically valid of the old Arthurian related stories and I don't know if this is just me falling for bad stories or if they truly were real.
Sunken kingdoms, missing kingdoms, Arthurian connections, Ancient Celtic tribes, Wales is so much more interesting then people give it credit for, thank you for sharing these cool stories and legends from Wales, they are all fascinating!
Thank you so much, I really appreciate that. It's my mission to show how fascinating Wales can be, so I'm glad you're enjoying the videos!
We have an interesting modern history too! Look up the Rebecca Riots and the Tryweryn protests.
There's also a sunken medieval town under a lake near me in the Kenfig sand dunes. Apparently you can hear the church bells occasionally
The who,e of Britain is ‘Celtic’ although in antiquity nobody used the term. The so called English are typically 65-70% Brythonic and 30-35% Germanic! And the same is true for the so called Scots. So we have an interlinked history. Some of the Welsh histories take place in London, while the Welsh collection known since Lady Guest as the Mabinogion includes myths set in Gloucester. The imagined battles of Arthur include ones which would be in England. There’s a long Welsh poem called Y Gododdin which features an epic battle between the warriors of Edinburgh and those of the former Roman base at Catterick, now ‘Angles’. Wales is what is left of Brythonic ruled Britain.
@@gwynedd4023 genetics are unrelated to language.
Here in northern germany we have a similar story, the legend of the sunken city of Rungholt.
Rungholt was once the richest town in the north sea, but it's people grew arrogant and greedy and so were punished when a great flood sank the entire city beneath the waves, though it is said that when the tide is low one can still hear churchbells ringing in the deep...
This story was long thought if as just that, a story. The atlantis of the north sea.
But it turned out that Rungholt and its fall were very much real. The city appears on old maps and even some remains were found during low tide, and while the town might not have had goldplated roofs it likely was quite wealthy, and in a strange twist even the story of how arrogance and greed caused the citys ruin might have some truth to it as the towns people were harvesting peat, which destabilized the ground, and when a great storm came the city and most of the island it sat on were devoured by the sea.
That's really interesting, especially with the peat harvesting, thanks for sharing
There's a similar Dutch legend - not surprising! The rich city of Saeftinghe in Zeeland. As with Rungholt, they were punished for their greed and pride.
And for this video quite fitting is the legend of Ys, a city in brittanny which was protected by its great walls before the princess charged with protecting the floodgates was seduced by the devil into opening them with the resulting deluge swallowing the entire city with only the king surviving.
So interesting.
It's crazy how many stories there are of a deluge being unleashed and only a king surviving
I can see why Tolkien was so inspired by Welsh history, language, and myth. Everything is so old, and deep, and mysterious. It’s the kind of place where ancient oaks live in the graves of kings, and stories are written in the very wind.
Its not just tolkien who is inspired by us either. As someone who speaks fluent Welsh i can honestly tell you I understand more of the elven language in The Witcher series than I do our sister language Cornish. Geralt’s name even comes from the Welsh name Gerallt. As does his elven name of Gwynbleidd. Gwyn being white, bleidd being derived from blaidd - wolf.
Some psychological whiplash for me is that comparatively speaking, the Welsh mythos aren't really that old. they FEEL old though. Like Alexander the Great would be older to the Britons at the time of Anglo-Saxon invasion than the Britons are to us. We are far close in time to the original myths of Arthur than we are to the Roman emperors. Yet, the ancient Mediterranean world seems so close because we see its legacy everyday and we have primary sources everywhere. Celtic history has been so lost and fragmented that it feels like a half-remembered dream from eons ago.
Tolkien was inspired by old English. Hence why he wrote futhorc in his books and the homeland was called the shire. Though. Welsh and English become 1 at some point in history. Prydain.
@@wheat-is-an-ugly-drug not that long ago all things considering, the word that became Wales and Welsh came from the Anglo-Saxons might have meant outsider/not one of us, and would have been used for anyone native to the British Isles, or at least not of Anglo-Saxon descent, there was also treaties between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to not aggravate the native British Tribes in the East-Midlands area.
Beautifully put
As a linguist, a T transforming over time to S is not impossible. They are both voiceless alveolars, which basically means they have the same place of articulation when you pronounce them and you don't use your voice when pronouncing them. The only difference between the two is the movement of air from the vocal tract. The T is a stop, meaning minimal air is moving out of the vocal tract. The ancient Welsh T may have been aspirated at the beginning of a syllable and over time "weakened" to a sibilant S, the opposite of a stop. So the idea that Teithi Hen may have changed over time to Seithenhin is absolutely plausible.
Add in dubious dentition, with a lisp to a pronuciation, and it really isn't a stretch to imagine the one turning into the other, or vice versa, over time.
Is this not one of the changes amongst the high German consonant shift? Or just my English speaking perspective haha.
Better > besser
Bit > bisschen
also Welsh, like most Celtic languages, has a long history of word-initial consonant spirantization
it happened between German and English.
But in combination with the word Ynis (was that it?), the T can be "swallowed", or less noticible. (Not a linguist.)
I'm not even Welsh but I can imagine how magical it must be to see the history of your land unfold through myths and legends into reality.
Sounds like high breasil (Irish mythical Island) all over again
HY BRASIL is no myth.@@franciscoacevedo3036
It is all worth preserving.
Wales is a shithole. Not as mythical nowadays.😭
It's not difficult to imagine costal settlements, dealing with seasonal and tidal floods, would, over generations, build a series of weirs and levies to hold back the typical inundation. (Imagine modern-day New Orleans but on a smaller scale.) However, when that tsunami or 500-year storm hits, it washes away the weirs and levies, resulting in immediate and catastrophic destruction of lands at or slightly below sea level by violent inundation.
You can find plenty of those in Northern Europe along the coast of the North Sea.
We saw it happen with Fukushima. They had barriers for tsunamis, but there was (likely it seems) an underwater landslide tsunami triggered by the earthquake, which also itself triggered another tsunami. The two combined for one of those once-in-500-years events. If we didn’t have the records and science and instant communication and infrastructure we do today, it could easily have just been entirely wiped out and a legend of a village once there that was wiped into the sea.
I agree that this is what we are likely seeing with these kingdoms.
By the weirs, I wonder if they were trying to build land by capturing sediment from the rivers and fill in the area from the main shore to the islands, and the purpose of inhabiting the islands with "kingdoms" was a way of keeping people on that task. The maintenance of the retaining walls would be essential. The sandbar at the river outlet reminds me of the Louisiana shoreline, where people used to build up land with the sediments of the Mississippi river. But much of this has stopped now that the river waters are being taken up and the flow has decreased. Not enough sediment is reaching the shoreline of the Gulf and Louisiana is now being washed away substantially. I wonder if there wasn't much more land in these seas in the AD eras, protected from storms and tsunamis by a lush growth of rushes. It would be a great place for aquaculture (fish farming!) Maybe in the 6th century this is something they're trying to hang onto or rebuild from their ancient memories. A booming economy fallen prey to an encroaching sea. A loss of manpower and population to the slave trade.
We are talking about the ATLANTIC coast I mean… have you seen the waves of a regular Atlantic storm??
As a dutchman, my soul resonates with the lost welsch. We have in living memory lost (and reclaimed!) large swatN9,ches of land to subsiding lands and storm tides overwhelming ancestral dikes and levies... some lands remain under the waves though. Estuaries are quite prone to these floods and the soft silt of estuary islands are easy prey to the rage of poseidon.
I went to Aberystwyth University studying Geography, we were told about the Sarn Cynfelyn causeway and a legend that the bells of Cantre’r Gwaelod can sometimes be heard from the coast, which inspired a song called Clychau Aberdyfi. In Aberdovey they have a bell under the pier that rings at high tide to celebrate the legend. We took tree cores from the submerged forest at Borth / Ynyslas the trees are 4,000 - 5,000 years old and were submerged around 3,000 years ago from my memory, Ynyslas is also interesting as during WW2 they performed rocket tests there.
I might sound like an idiot here but reading "Clychau Aberdyfi" made me wonder if these legends are what inspired Lovecraft when coming up with is Cthullu mythos?
@@hedgehog3180 I've only read a little lovecraft, how does "clychau Aberdyfi" remind you of the cthulu mythos?
@@nevreiha Pretty sure it's the naming convention or 'language'. Welsh language and it's transcription sound and look very 'alien' to the most of... hmm... Europe.
Never knew about the rocket tests from Ynyslas! Knew Tywyn played somewhat of a part in the war effort with using the coast and dunes as a landing ground for amphibious assaults, but I thought that was pretty much it for that area of Wales. Learn something new everyday!
@@hedgehog3180why
I was reminded of the town of Rungholt in North Frisia, in modern Germany, which sank beneath the waves of the North Sea in a storm tide in 1362. If anything it proves that it is definitely possible for some destructive cataclysm to cause an entire settlement to be lost to the sea.
A somewhat similar thing happened in Jutland, in 1825 a storm cut off the northern part and technically turned it into an island however given the historical precedent no one really considers it an island and it's treated as part of the Jutland peninsula. It's an interesting example of a major geographic change in recent history where popular imagination still hasn't really caught up with reality.
The flooding of 1362 is known as The Great Man-drowning (referring to people rather than men) in Danish History, and based on earlier maps resulted in the loss of quite a bit of land around the south-western part of Jutland, between the islands of Fanø, Mandø and Rømø, or most of the Danish Wadden Sea area. It isn't unlikely that the rest of the Wadden Sea saw similar permanent loss of land.
Frisia (Friesland) has a history of dikes. (Pumping the water out to make more land...etc.) Though I will admit I don't know if that comes from Dutch settlers or not. Idk.
Point is, if a dike broke then they could easily lose a landmass.
Side note, I've always found it interesting that what was Friesland is divided between the Dutch and Germans. With the Dutch portion still maintaining a degree of independence. (Passports, language, and killing anyone who called them Dutch till mid 1800s.)
@@chetw3139 wtf you're wrong in every sentence. The dikes were not by Dutch settlers at all. And the division is only between what currently is the Netherlands and Germany, it was not formally divided between two nations. While the language thankfully is fought for, the passports were just a joke from a few years back, and not taken serious.
Reminds me of Dunwich....
Wales trying to not lose a kingdom to fleeting memories every 5 minutes (impossible)
On a more serious note though, I wasn't initially interested in welsh history, but as a former non subscriber, this is the 3rd video I've seen from you(except the king arthur one) where Wales has lost a kingdom(mythical or not) to obscurity, which isn't a lot, but it's weird it's happened thrice.
I'm glad you're interested in Welsh history now, and I agree it's very strange and pretty comical how often it has happened! I've covered the three most famous ones with the completion of this video, but there are a bunch more believe it or not.
@@CambrianChronicles For a small patch of land, in an island nation, Wales has a lot of interesting history, so I'm looking forward to those lol
@@CambrianChronicles Now I'm super interested. And actually I have an old book on the history of Wales that's been on my to be read pile forever.
It's a long time, a lot of upheaval (rise and fall of the Romans), plus the shrinking of a culture from a large proportion of the UK to just Wales. Imagine tales being told about Newcastle, only remembered by people who lived their lives in Maidstone, Kent. I do wonder how many tales about "Wales" are about the whole of Britain, with a cultural memory of a larger Celtic area. It's a shame England lost so much of its Celtic culture, but wonderful that Wales retained it.
It's probably safe to assume that Wales isn't actually unusual in this regard and the rest of Europe and possibly the world is also littered with lost kingdoms. There's definitely some evidence of that in Denmark, the country is usually dated to the 930s with the reign of Gorm the Old but Frankish Chronicles mention a Danish king from the 800s. There's also a very rich tomb on Funen which possibility housed some sort of king but also was raided during the reign of Gorm the Old, not for its riches, lots of them can still be found, but to remove the body of whoever was buried there, seemingly with the intention of removing them from history in some symbolic way.
What does make Wales stand out is that unlike much of the rest of post-Roman Europe we have very extensive sources from it, I'm guessing because it was already Christian and thus there was a clergy to preserve written history and document events. That means that in the 21st century it is actually possible to discover these lost kingdoms because clear written accounts persist and we aren't solely reliant on archeology and outside sources like in much of the rest of Europe. Extrapolating from that is pure speculation but I can't help but wonder if Wales is just a window into what the Early Medieval World was like in general, like one of those rare fossils that preserve soft tissue from an extinct species giving us a valuable insight into what it was actually like.
To me this bears a striking rememblance of the area known as Doggerland which disappeared quite violently after a series of minor floodings from the glacial ices that melted.
They're actually part of the same ancient landmass, that was Britain and the area around it, forming a peninsula on the end of Europa during the last ice age. So it could very well be directly connected in their causes for disappearance too
Most of Doggerland took thousands of years to sink though, it was just the final remains that sunk due to either a massive storm or a tsunami.
It doesn't really add up in time with the stories here. Yeah, this was land too when Doggerland was a thing but the stories make it clear that these islands were likely remain of sand and gravel the ice left when the last ice age ended and got eroded away by storms and maybe a tsunami.
The English large city of Dunwich is far more similar here, it was once the third largest city in England but after a bunch of storms most of the land it stood on had fallen into the sea. The first half of the city fell during a massive storm which sounds more similar to this story.
I don't think the story would have survived as well as it did for the over 5000 years since Doggerland sunk either. Dunwhich BTW sank in 1347 AD.
Considering the stories, most of the land likely sunk somewhere between 300-900 AD even if up to 1200 is possible, and some sandbanks remained to the time the first map was drawn.
But of course, a serious archaeological dig by underwater archaeologists should give us enough artifacts to date if the island in fact were occupied. Until then we are still just speculating.
a comment in here claimed that in one of the mentioned areas, the dead trees were dated to 3000 years ago. i have seen other documentaries used the same data so I'm assuming the 3000 years mark might be correct.
@@RoseNZieg 3000 years do sound plausible for one of the lost islands outside Wales. For Doggerland no, the dates there seems more to be around 8500 years and older.
Do you know exactly where those samples are from? It is interesting and 3000 years would make it about 1500 years earlier from when the first stories were recorded which is plausible for a land with good traditions of oral history.
@@loke6664 i was going to comment that Dogger land sinking was very gradual but you already did it ^^
The comment about the sunken forest says this "We took tree cores from the submerged forest at Borth / Ynyslas the trees are 4,000 - 5,000 years old and were submerged around 3,000 years ago from my memory"
2000 y/o tress are not impossible but very uncommon, specially near settled areas, so unless I read the paper with the carbon dating to cofnirm it I would just take the age of "around 3000 years old" for the tress.
Ok so this is weird, but when i was younger my family had a caravan in Ceredigion. And when I was younger I used to have dreams about islands that would appear at mega low tides (were talking tides so low they don’t exist in the real world since it was a dream) and I would go over on boats and explore sunken kingdoms. Never knew there were actual sunken islands until today, bit of a weird coincidence.
Yeah could be. Could you have ever heard it considering it's extremely well known story today and forgot?
@@teiloturner2760 Never heard of this shit.
Not everyone on YT is an inbred islander.
Even today Wales is semi-legendary.
The worlds greatest scientists, inventors, and artists almost universally claimed that some vital aspect of their work came to them in a dream.
I would not say that is a coincidence. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of…..
I'll admit, I spent most of this video thinking about the Petrified Forest in Borth and Ynyslas. When that was discovered back in 2014, everyone had the same thing on their mind. Cantre'r Gwaelod was based on a real place! This was a hellishly good video. Adding some actual historical info to the bafflingly large amount of confusing mythology we've got here.
Thank you! The petrified forests are fascinatingly beautiful, I’m glad you enjoyed the video
this might help ..... its guitneu ..not gwddno . thats the irish t there but pronounced "d" for regional variation ... yama o hyd ... i am here/(not beheaded ?) ..
Discovered in 2014?
I remember seeing the stumps in the seventies.
@@Paul-tp9vfDiscovered for the public, things get found then forgotten usually or not published as a discovery which leads to people getting the credit or taking claim since they don’t know it’s been seen before
The petrified forest was taught at Aberystwyth University for environmental science when i was there 88-91
Geologist here! Very interesting video from the historic side but also from a geological standpoint, since as you conclude this is all likely based on actual landmasses that existed.
I´m not familiar with the area at all, so I can only speak of generalities, but those glaciar rock deposits that streched into the sea happen both at the sides and at the front of the glacier, the result of the ice carrying forward (ice literally flows very slowly in glaciers) big chunks of rock when it freezes (picking them up or breaking the soil/rock underneath them) then dropping them when the ice melts (that´s why it happens at the front and sides of the glacier).
Usually when the ice permanently retreats these deposits form natural barriers which often form a lake or lagoon protected from the sea, at least until the front deposit is eroded or covered by rising sea levels. When this happens the side deposits can still act as wave breakers and gradually trap sand/sediments from the ocean currents, even forming or expanding existing beaches. But one big storm can erode/wash away all this sand/sediment together with some of the heavier material of the old glacier deposit, making it impossible for the beach to form again since there glaciar deposit can no longer act as a wave breaker. It also can happen gradually of course but a storm fits more with the narrative mentioned in the stories as you say.
I think the "lost islands" could easily have been those frontal glaciar deposits, which being further into the sea are more eroded and not visible at low tide today like the side ones. And at the same time people back then could have seen ample and flat beaches in the area for centuries just to wake up one day after a storm and see most of it gone, adding to the tale of a sunken kingdom. Also sorry for any crude or not scientific vocabulary, English is not my mother tongue so expressing ideas in it is sometimes hard ^^
A fantastic description from another standpoint!
I absolutely love this style of storytelling history. It feels like we are solving a mystery and piecing bits together in a scholarly way.
Thank you, it’s really fun to write so I’m glad you enjoy listening to it!
I agree. Wonderful!
I know nothing about Welsh history or even that much British history, but these videos on lost kingdoms and historical mysteries are amazing. Keep it up!
Thank you, I'm happy you find them interesting!
I was told a story by my grandmother, who was from Aberdyfi, who said that there was an old town of Aberdyfi under the waves offshore. When the wind and tide were in the right direction, you could hear the bells of the sunken Church.
Actually the most interesting historical UA-camr, no exceptions
I have literally zero connection to wales, or the British isles, or even Western Europe, but this guy makes me love that place
Thank you, that's very kind of you! I'm glad to have introduced you to somewhere new
Just an observation on Ynys Seiriol's previous English name of "Priest-holme". In Spanish, puffins are called "frailecillos", literally "little friars". There are several other languages where puffins are named for friars, deans and priests - could there be a connection between that and the island's previous English name?
More likely it was named for actual priests - according to tradition, St Seiriol moved to the island and became a hermit there after establishing the nearby Penmôn Priory in the sixth century, and there were later religious establishments on the island too, the remains of which can still be found.
@@KaiserMacCleg fascinating, thank you for the information.
@@KaiserMacClegyou could still have a connection. Perhaps when the Spanish visited the puffins would stand around listening to clergy preach giving rise to the name.
Let us point out, Monks & Pruests plopped themselves wherever the Indigenous Peoples had revered spiritual sites… so the idea that a Woman of Respondibilities lived somewhere, you can be assured the Catholic Church plunked into the spot
ESL
You’re a lost Welsh kingdom. He’s a lost Welsh kingdom. I’m a lost Welsh kingdom. We’re all lost Welsh kingdoms.
But thanks to Cambrian Chronicles, we're all coming together to be found again ;) Cymru am byth x
Is anyone here not a lost welsh kingdom?
Deez nuts are a lost Welsh Kingdom.
Yer moms a lost Welsh kingdom.
Are there any other lost Welsh Kingdoms I should know about?!
when I looked up Gwynn Ap Nudd and Gwyddno's sunken kingdom, I never realized just how deep into manuscripts, local legends, cartography, and historical events this story went into. That being said, I did find some interesting connections to other flooded lands associated with Brythonic language-speaking regions: the Kingdom of Lyonesse, usually said to be the homeland of Sir Tristan and located somewhere near Cornwall (altho wikipedia said the legend and even the name of Lyonesse isn't consistent); and the Breton legend of Ys, which sank underwater due to the machinations of the princes Dahut (kinda like how Mererid let Maes Gwyddno sink underwater). Gwynn Ap Nudd's random connection to Gwyddno is also interesting to me, mostly bc Gwynn is this psychopomp fairy king figure who's better known from 'Culwch and Olwen'
There is also remains of an ancient forest at low tide where Lyonesse is meant to be - I have seen both that and the one at Borth at low tide
As someone who lives in Machynlleth I’ve always heard about Cantre’r Gwaelod being told to me growing up, this however has been the best so far. Hats off to you for bringing our amazing history and folklore to so many people. Makes my time exploring the old ruins and sights that bit more exciting.
Thank you, I’m glad you enjoyed it!
Just imagine what other stories the ancient britons once had after seeing the petrified forest once the waves unveiled them. Perhaps a glimpse of the "Otherworld".
Folk memory is one of the most fascinating subjects for me, also the most maddening for the very same reasons I love it. It cannot ever be pieced together definitively, even with primary sources. However examining it makes us all have to reevaluate how much of history, be it recorded or not, is a matter of consensus not fact. Makes one appreciate what we know and challenge the definitiveness of that knowledge. The fact that so many historic kingdoms and figures could be several real events misconstrued, or any combination of them shows how much rides on the interpretation of whoever recorded the text we have. This is such a good example of how "corrections" can end up accidentally erasing greater context because historical writers often had to guess or work from biases just as we do.
Great video
Well said, I'm glad you liked the video!
This is such a cool discovery to make. I’m from the Pacific Northwest in the USA, so learning welsh history on your channel had been a refreshing treat. Stuff like this makes me wish we still had more of the records and oral traditions of native groups across the Americas; imagine how many stories like this there must be here. The english and their colonial descendants really did mess everything up with their genocide and colonization. (Before anyone comes after me in the comments I know that American expansion and colonization was done by more Europeans than just the english).
A lot of the southern US explorers were actually Scottish, Irish or Welsh as they were the ones seeking to escape poverty. Can't blame it on the English. Also consider the french and Spanish quite literally owned large swathes of inland US and Pacific coast before the US itself started kicking out natives. British policies towards natives were to use them as trade opportunities for valuable resources unless aggression was displayed. American policies were to expand and monopolize the lands, removing natives through force if necessary. Blaming it on England is very silly considering a majority of the damage to Native Americans was after the US declared independence.
A storm in 2020 revealed fossilised trees under the sand at cardigan bay, being th remnants of the old forest. Lost kingdoms interests me so much, love your videos so well researched. If the history essays in uni were video format my degree would have been so much easier 😂👍
Anyone interested there's a podcast series called Fall of Civilizations which covers similar stories around the world.
I’m not sure how I would get in contact with you other than through your comment section but I would honestly do full Welsh translations of your videos for free. I’m a uni student doing performance and media in the university of Salford and I think talking about our people’s history in our native language would help with my hiraeth. I’m a huge fan of your videos and I wish you made videos whilst I was in school. Idk if they do but I hope they play these videos in schools and I think having a Welsh translation would be ideal for our local schools.
Oh wow, that'd be awesome! I've tried to use UA-cam's auto translate whilst correcting the occasional words/phrases, but my Welsh is nowhere near good enough lol.
There's an email in my channel's 'about' section if you look at it on a computer, feel free to email me through there, then I could send you the script!
The lost kingdoms were collectively called 'y cantre gwaelod' (bottom homes of hundreds) and we're said to exist between the Western coast of wales and eastern coast of Ireland.
Pwyll embarrassing himself chasing rhiannon was said to take place in these lands aswel as the explanation that bendigeidfran somehow walked to Ireland to rescue his sister.
Never heard of 'Ynys teithi hen' though, it's interesting that it translates to 'island of old homes'.
The wars around this time between everybody supposedly explains the original rivally between the northern highlanders(gogledd/gogs) and the southern lowlanders that still exists today in Wales.
Please consider I was taught this in school so I'm going off childhood memorys.
Interesting stuff separating fact from fiction.
Very thoughtfully put together presentation thank you!
When I worked in Nottinghamshire I was told a story which shows that legends and myths preserved for millennia can hold kernels of truth:
A man who had worked in construction all his life told me of a small lake which had always been associated with the rumour that Roman treasure was at the bottom of the lake. I believe this was in the East Midlands somewhere. Many people had tried dredging and exploring the depths but nothing was found so it was considered a myth.
Eventually a new bypass was to be built and the lake had to be drained and excavated to make the major road. A small boy discovered gold items on the excavation site and other locals came, taking some gold items home. When the authorities found out, the locals were made to bring it all back! They eventually indeed discovered a hoard of Roman treasure which is now in the British Museum and one of the more valuable finds discovered in Britain!
Long have I waited for this. You deserve way more positive attention than what you’re getting!
Haha thank you, that's very kind!
As someone who loves history of ancient kingdoms, I can see where Tolkien's masterpiece was inspired from. Discovering history is a fascinating journey, your visuals and storytelling are mesmerising. Thank you.
Thank you, I'm glad you liked it!
Visit Snowdonia. Makes you feel like you are in Lord of the Rings
@@phillippevictor I haven't been there but I bet it's a beautiful place. Tolkien must have been inspired by remote places with lost stories like this. Thanks for your feedback 🙏🏻
These stories are so similar to the story of the lost land of Lyonnesse off the coast of Cornwall which I studied at university. I live in Oregon on the west coast of the US and we have a sunken petrified forest on one of our beaches. It disappears and reappears depending upon the weather. I wonder if our local tribes have any legends related to it. I’ll need to look that up. Anyway, very informative video! I love how much research you put into these!
I cant wait for historians in a thousand years to be searching for the elusive scottish castle 'Hogwarts' from the ancient texts.
Maybe the cataclysm of around 536 AD caused a change in the Welsh coastline. Poorly documented as it was in Roman times, the loss of a string of major coastal settlements, possibly already ravaged by coastal incursions would have then been buried by what happened to those that survived as they emerged from the accompanying climactic disaster.
Fantastic video btw, thank you.
On the coast road to Drommore (South west Scotland) the road goes past a house by the sea, it used to be a farm with fields out the front of it until one night and an horrendous storm, in the morning they found all the fields had just been washed away, the family had lost their animals and land in one night, today there is nothing to tell it was there, so the islands off the Welsh coast may have had a similar fate.
The farms fate although having happened a good while ago was still within living memory when I first heard about it.
Wouldn't be the last time the Isles have lost land to the sea. Fascinating research.
There are similar accounts on the West Coast of Guernsey from c. 6th or 7th century of a tidal wave inundating Vazon Bay. After a decent storm, the sand is scoured back and you can see the tree trunks and forest floor exposed. I was surprised at how recent it was.
My wife divorced me, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and I lost both my arms today. But Cambrian Chronicles uploaded so I’d say it’s been a pretty good day
I’ll spin my pray wheel for you all weekend.
Pleased the chronicles picked you up a little
May god bless your soul
Pretty good punctuation for not having any arms. 😂❤
At least your mom is there for you!
@@runed0s86hahaha i get that reference
Ok, having published on post-glacial sea level in Great Britain I will say the following:
It's not just ocean levels rising but land subsidence that causes relative sea level rise in the southern Irish Sea. This is an ongoing consequence of post-glacial viscoelastic relaxation.
A tsunami event should be detectable in sedimentary records from the relevant river beds. Tsunamis carry clearly distinct debris up the river and deposit it as a distinctive layer. There is an example of this style of feature in the Firth of Forth.
I grew up in St Davids.
In Saint Brides bay theres an ancient forest and village 3 miles off the coast.
Ive personally walked over the petrified timbers of the forest at rare lle tides.
Im from south wales and as someone that is obsessed with history ive never heard of this, thank you for educating me on this topic. I will most definitely be looking more into this topic..Great video
Interesting video. Just one small note: "Low water spring" doesn't mean " the low tides of spring," it means "a low spring tide." Springs are a part of the tidal cycle where the tidal range is most extreme (the opposite being neaps). A low spring tide is the lowest tide normally experienced in the area, confusingly it has nothing to do with the season. I suspect it was named after the biblical assumption that tides were caused by "fountains of the deep."
I really loved watching this because I'm fascinated by sunken lands. It blows my minds that fishermen on the dogger bank come back with neanderthal skulls and tiger bones and that you can just sail across what used to be fertile valleys and farmland.
Ah ok, thank you for the correction! I though "low water spring" looked a bit odd, but once source mentioned how you can best see the sarnau during the low tides of spring after winter storms, so I figured it must be the seasons haha
I’m from Dinbych and travel all over North Wales, so know all these place you are on about. I watch so so many niche history channels yet have never discovered yours. How I have taken so long to find this channel is unbelievable. Wow. Great video.
Thank you! I'm glad you found it too!
Great detailed research as always! Wales has so many interesting legends and stories.
Now I have to plan another trip to wales despite the fact that I just came back from one!
I find this channel when I seeking information about celtic languages. This channel is like treasure to me. No one talk about celts in his channel, but finally I found this!
I have started watching this stuff about a year ago and man, these stories and videos are ma favourite. I will likely start adapting these into my RPG games and worlds that I run as GM with my friends. Thanks a lot for making this detailed stuff and I cant wait to see what more historical mysteries you uncover.
Thank you, I’m glad you’re enjoying them!
Fascinating! Being on the other side of the country in Suffolk, we have our fair share of land lost to the sea: Dunwich and, of course, Dogger Land being the most notable.
Although you did a thorough job unravelling the story, it's so complicated I'll need to watch it again, to follow the trail.
Easton ness just north of Southwold too, further east than Lowestoft's Ness point in the C16-17th. Shipden ness off Cromer. Watched hundreds of meters of land fall into the sea here over 60 years. Recently learned of a major medieval "port" at the mouth of the Deben in medieval times, the port of Goseford, not a town itslef but a collection of wharfs across several villages & different creeks at the mouth of the deben.They being Bawdsey, Alderton, Kirton & others. It was mentioned on a par with Gt Yarmouth & Kings Lynn, mentioned even when Dunwich was not.
Bit OT from Wales, but my wife was half Welsh too.
First of all thanks for the great content. As others mention in the comments, storms are entirely capable of destroying Islands. In 1362 a storm tide completely swept away large parts on the coast of Friesland (now the wadden sea in the border area between Denmark and Germany) including the allegedly large and thriving city of Rungholt. Though there are no maps from this time that can really be trusted, remains of Rungholt have been found and it is clear that the storm tide did indeed change coastal landscape of the entire wadden sea region of modern day Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.
You refer to historically recorded events. With Doggerland dissapearing 'only' 6.500 years ago, and lots more lands gone from the coasts of now Germanic speaking regions, since they became Germanic speaking, you'd think there'd be a body of legends in the Germanic languages refering to them. I'm not aware of such legends.
But that belongs to a more flat type of landscape than the one of Wales: a storm surge can devastate and even destroy an island that is barely above sea level, what is characteristic of Friesland and the Netherlands, but hardly do anything to the rocky coastal landscape of Wales.
@@LuisAldamiz I should start by saying i am no expert in this at all. You are of course right about that - a single storm will hardly have the least effect on a rocky coast. Though islands formed by build up of sand in the outlet of rivers (as seems to be the case in the video) might be a different matter - especially with the added effect of gradually rising sea levels. Of course all such claims should be based on sound scientific data, not some guy speculating from his couch (me). My point is simply that the lack of recorded volcanic/seismological activity does not necessarily exclude the sudden disapperance of these islands.
@@drychaf I'm not an expert in this by any means, but as far as I know, the end of Doggerland is usually estimated to be a bit earlier than that, somewhere between 7000 and 8000 years ago. And, at least in terms of the impact on humans in the area, it was likely not a single disastrous event but rather a gradual process where the landscape slowly turned into salty marshes over a long period of time, killing off the local flora and fauna.
Since the human societies in the region at this time were, to the best of my knowledge, all hunter-gatherers (the Neolithic Revolution wouldn't reach the area for another couple of centuries), they would have followed the animals and plants into more hospitable regions long before the area sank below sea level. The gradual loss of familiar hunting grounds would have been disruptive but far less traumatic than the sudden destruction of a settlement that had been thriving in the same place for centuries, so it might not necessarily have left an easily recognisable trace in local legends.
@@pellehansen8929 - But who builds villages, let alone cities or kingdoms atop of unstable sandbars?
Oh... wait...
this is a good representation of one of modern archaeology's more perplexing challenges. our ancestors flocked to coasts for sustenance since before our form of hominid existed and sea levels have risen enormously since those times, so there are probably alot of important prehistoric sites under the waves and funding for finding, let alone excavating, these sites is non-existent.
i was recommended this channel recently, and am going back and watching all of your videos, in order, and i feel compelled to tell you how much i appreciate the captions on your videos. honestly, they're such a huge help to me, as i attempt to digest the information being presented, so thank you so much!
You're welcome! They're no trouble at all to make, and I use them frequently myself when they exist. I wish more creators would make them, UA-cam will literally do it for you if you import your script, it's so easy
Surprised that you didn’t mention that the (almost) exact same story exists and is popular in French Britanny, as the drowned city of Ys. Obviously the legend was brought by the Britons and relocalized there, but it means the story is at least older than the 5th century.
I wanted to originally but I couldn't fit it into the already long script. Ys is super interesting although it's also extremely similar to the story of Gwyddno, it may be based on an older story but it's also entirely possible that it was inspired from Cantre'r Gwaelod
I've heard some say that the origin for the name Paris comes from par Ys, meaning "like Ys", in scale and grandeur, which is an interesting thought.
The Cornish have an almost identical legend of the Kingdom of Lyonesse 😯
@@jaredriddle8320 Perhaps, though the Romans named Paris after the Parisi. That would mean the Parisi would have taken their name from a different lost settlement by that name.
People do not understand how much of our history we have lost to the sea and to the oceans.
Portugal has lots of potential cases but no one exists here to study them except me and a few academics.
I'm sure someone has already said this but this reminds me of the Minoan eruption in the 16th century BCE that destroyed the Minoan settlements on the island that is now known as Santorini. It is also believed (as far as I am aware) that there were more islands forming the caldera around the volcano prior to this eruption but that several of them 'sunk' due to the eruption and it's effects. This is something that is thought to have inspired the idea of Atlantis. Which I find crazy as it shows how strong folk memory is and how there are a lot of these similar stories around the world that all have a little grain of truth to them when you dig deep!
The island of Santorini in ancient times was known as Thera. A lot of people that prescribe to Atlantis being a real place put it as Thera/Santorini. I actually believe 'Atlantis' is similar to this, a folk memory that has become an allegory.
There are also the ancient Greek colony of Dioscurias (Sebastopolis, modern Sukhumi) slowly sinking beneath the Black Sea, and the year 365 Crete earthquake which sunk a part of Alexandria and is recorded in Roman history.
Seithenhin and Mererid are the really interesting characters here. They are clearly recognisable. Seithenhin would have been quite outspoken, which would be why the stories are remembered. He'd have put a lot of effort into spreading them. Mererid would have been his muse. The hallmarks are there. She is the unrequited love. As the seas threatened the island, he would no doubt have spoken of the danger and tried to warn people, but found that his warnings fell on deaf ears. Mererid's ears would have been the most deaf of all, and he would have grown immensely frustrated at her, and when his warnings, unheeded, came true as the sea claimed the islands, that would have stoked his annoyance at her.
He is a similar character to Lancelot in the Arthurian legends, and she would have been his Guinevere. Following the cataclysm, he'd have probably become more philosophical about the whole affair, and would have been more like Galahad, or possibly Gawain. He was someone to whom the spirit of the sea spoke, as the lady of the lake spoke to the Arthurian knights. This story has water sprite written all over it.
I didn’t know anything about this story before, but my assumption was that she came across as some type of goddess.
I love living in Ceredigion, so much to know and see. Will forever cherish our land.
One thing that immediately came to mind was the name Mereid and how closely it resembles Nereides, the Greek minor goddesses of the oceans. Her actions as described also parallel this hypothetical connection, as does her later disappearance from the narrative in subsequent versions, as the clerics recording the tales would be reluctant to speak about the role of a pagan deity in the sinking of the lands.
Quite lose
@@gwynedd4023 Not looking for a direct connection between the two words (I’m not a linguist so I’m not qualified to speak on the relationship between the two words); but her “job title” and how she caused the flooding are both nonsensical in a secular context, but likewise both make sense if she is a minor water deity/water spirit, like a Nereid.
i am not at all familiar with wales or the welsh language, and this video was difficult for me to follow because welsh is such a foreign language to me, but it was fascinating and i am now subscribed to learn more about wales! :)
So glad that you also found the Haslett and Willis paper and a well presented video. One way to understand how soft and easy to erode the material that made up these islands is to look at an area like Llanon ,where unconsolidated glacial deposits underlie the land, on the National Library of Scotland site to see how in about 100 yrs the low lying cliff has moved back about 100 metres.
If islands in Bae Ceridigion where made of similar material anchored to the Sarnau with sand bars and peat marsh to the rear (like Borth Bog) then it is easier to imagine then being overwhelmed in a catastrophe. The sea in the intervening time eroding the previous land surface to a wave cut shelf. The Sarnau being more resistant with boulder clay holding the bars together to this day.
The tree stumps at Ynyslas, Borth are best viewed at low spring tides after winter storms.
You need to produce these for a TV audience as well, a real skill.
Thank you for the insight and the kind words, much appreciated!
Brilliant video on stuff I never knew about. Love exploring early Welsh Middle Ages mystery lore. Can’t wait for your next video suggestions. I’d love it if you did more on the Silures from your Celtic tribes video. Why they were so resistant to the Romans keeping them out of South Wales for so long and how they were defeated.
Reminds me of the Scilly Isles in Cornwall, where there’s fields and things underwater
I just gotta say I love what you do man. I have no connection to the British Isles or even Europe (being Mexican), but ever since I started listening to the British History Podcast I've been fascinated with the old Britons and Wales.
I wonder if making videos about Strathclyde and the other Northern British kingdoms is something you would ever do. I'm absolutely fascinated with how Alt Clud/Strathclyde manage to survive so far into the medieval age, yet with so little information about them around to read outside of academic papers.
Definitely at some point! The Brythonic north is super interesting and I'd love to cover it someday
If you are Mexican you have a connection with Europe
If you are Mexican you have a connection with Europe
Your videos are so good, that it makes people with no connection to Wales very interested in the most obscure stories! Good work!
Thank you!
in the early 90's in school I learned about this and did a few projects about the tale of Bae Ceridigion, Cantre Gwaelod and stories in the Mabinogi. One of my earliest memories.
Excellent video.
I was struck by the parallels with the Breton story of the Kingdom of Ys (Kêr Ys). As you no doubt know, this involves a King Gralon who rules over a coastal city protected from the rising sea by a dike. The kingdom is then flooded when his daughter, Dahut, opens the dike (her reasons vary depending on the account, but in at least in some versions she became drunk while feasting with her lover). The kingdom is then engulfed by the sea and disappears beneath the waves. It seems clear that these two stories come from the same tradition… Was this a story that British migrants brought with them during their medieval migration into the Armorican Peninsula? Or did it develop later in Brittany based on Welsh inspiration?
Lyonesse too, in Cornwall, another land which was once protected by dykes, lost beneath the sea in a single night. I find it hard to believe that all these stories, so close to each other geographically, could have sprung up independently from one another.
Must be the same story, surely, each place with its own version.
I was originally going to include some parallels with the related stories such as Ys, but in the end it seemed to derail the video a bit, I’ll probably cover them in the future.
As for the similarities, I only did some light research, but it seems like the story of Ys comes about quite a bit later than the story of Gwyddno. And as they are so similar, it was likely based on Gwyddno’s tale, perhaps brought over by the Britons like you said
@@CambrianChroniclesfollow up ?
@@CambrianChronicles I hope you add Lyonesse and Tir na Nog in your Part II.
The perfect Friday night for me as an Argentinean from Buenos Aires: Welsh history and pizza , hope to visit it someday!
pd: the edition job was superb ❤
Thank you very much, I’m really glad you enjoyed the video!
Fascinating. This the third of yours I have watched. I love Wales and all things ancient of the British isles. Subscribed.
I feel like Tolkien heard these stories at some point, and took some inspiration to make the tale of Akallabêth
It's interesting to hear of folk stories passed down for so many generations. Here in Australia, the indigenous people have stories that reflect events from over 10,000 years ago. It's absolutely mind-boggling to think that campfire stories can be told for such long periods of time and not have lost all the original context.
I find it sad that the Blackwells in Edinburgh only has one tiny little row of books in the corner about Welsh History or Literature. There is no Arthurian Legend either. Makes me wonder if no consumers are interested because I think they should be?
Yeah Wales always has such a small section (if it has any at all) except for in Wales, hopefully in the future that’ll change
@@CambrianChronicles it’s sad because England has an entire room just for certain periods and then Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Ireland have almost nothing. I’m aware English history is huge but so are the other countries. They are all equally important.
I just discovered this channel. I loved Wales/Cymru ever since I visited in 2000 and I bought the New Cambridge Medieval History series just to read more about it.
You're doing fantastic work so keep it up. I'm looking forward to learning more.
Fascinating story and research. Thank you!
Wow thank you so much, that means a lot! Not to gush but your posts on r/Newtubers were/are some of the most helpful resources I've had in growing my channel, so thank you again
Hello from England, my Welsh cousin. I'm a little late to this party, but as this video appeared in my timeline, I thought I would watch and listen; I am so pleased that I did. I found this fascinating. What I liked most was the pronunciation of Welsh names, which I attempted to pronounce (mostly incorrectly by quite some margin) before the commentator. 'dd' is pronounced as 'th', how thoroughly interesting.
I'm now hooked, and you have a new subcriber.
Thank you for posting this. I've just noticed to the right, there's a suggested video on King Arthur whose legend I believe I am quite well versed on. I expect to be corrected and look forward to it. :)
A day when you upload another video is truly a very happy day! I genuinely appreciate all the effort you put towards your videos, they are so incredibly fascinating and make my day.
Thank you so much, that's very kind of you and I'm really glad you enjoy them!
It's funny how we obsess with coastal erosion and saving beach front houses, but historically we've lost entire regions. Walton-on-the-Naze over on the east of England is a 'replacement' Walton for one that is now 9 miles out to sea.
Recently discovered your channel, and am binging it! I love it. As someone who is proud of my welsh heritage, and with a deep family connection to north wales, I have always been fascinated by Celtic/Britonic lore and myth. Keep them coming,
As a resident of Aberystwyth i can confirm there are no islands however if you look at a nautical map for depth you'll see that land has been swallowed up but the seabed is very flat and shallow in a very localised way once you get 10 meters out... possibly two peaks from either side of a valley...
The nautical map and geography suggests there was land or islands... at one point the far out sea is 2 meters deep but 12 meters deep close to the shoreline...
peaks and valleys would still be a feature and the beach is made of slate but surrounding beaches are made of sand...
the existing valley to the rear of Aberystwyth if extended out would form the two islands in about the same place...
your videos are always a treat, thanks for the excellent content
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoy them
Right, the areas between Aberystwyth and Aberdyfi is Borth, and as a matter of fact in 2014 during a very low tide i stood on the stumps of an ancient woodlands, huge stumps of what resembled bog wood, but since they have instaled tidal protection the sand has increased and buried it all, so at some point before the sea level had ether risen or the land had sunk. But it's a fact, and i personally stood in that woodland.
A magnificent summary of what was probably, but may not have been.
And yet I find myself believing in a folk memory, because little else makes sense.
Thank you for the summary - very much appreciated.
Thank you for watching, I'm glad you enjoyed
Really glad you did such a deep dive into this stuff.
If you're looking for other singular dramatic events that could bring about a sudden destruction, look into Phillip Runggaldier's Llyn Llion theory, of the bursting of a glacial lake in the Irish Sea, which if shown to be true bears remarkable similarity to legends. Note that Runggaldier is an amateur, and while I tend to agree with his geological argument which is in his area of expertise, he really confuses his ideas on the historical front, and I'm doubtful that his proposed event could have been preserved in such specific detail for over 13000 years. But it's very stimulating stuff.
I love the idea of lost knowledge and events being passed down unknowingly through old stories and oral tradition. It makes me wonder how old could the oldest stories, phrases, or even words be.
Indeed! It’s super interesting, the Mabinogion in general is a great resource for seeing how old memories have been passed down, but a 3000+ year old memory of the Irish Sea being shallower is definitely my favourite
There's a study of oral stories from coastal aboriginal people of Australia that match to sea rises of 7-10 thousand years ago!
Also the 7 sisters stars (Pleiades?) were only visible as separate 7 stars thousand(s?) years ago. (2 are too close nowadays to see as 7 stars by the naked eye).
I had a walk out as far as possible on Sarn Cynfelyn at the lowest tide of the year, and it was quite strange being so far away from the land surrounded by sea, looking back at the coastline a fair distance away.
Amazing video! You are underrated! I wish you well in your career!
Thank you!
There was, in fact, a major tsunami that wiped out a lot of coastal Great Britain about 8,000 years ago. That’s along time, but it would definitely have been an event that could have had a lasting impact in oral history/legend. It was big enough to reach a mile inland in some locations, so coastal islands would certainly have been swamped. It was not caused by an earthquake, but by an undersea land slump in the North Sea.
One thing I think you missed or glossed over a bit. If the core story is old and wide spread, it would be quite common for people to at least locally have named places after the story. Like how small insignificant structures/geographical features can often locally get named after large historically or fictitious counterparts as a bit of a joke. Or even just as an embellishment to entertain children. Even if the origin of the story took place somewhere else completely, as long as the story had spread there. You could very well have had hundreds of local places named after the story, but only a couple ever being documented and fewer still remaining to this day.
Nearly all of those names are still in use in Iceland today. Not many people realize that Iceland was settled by Kelts, apparently Welsh-Kelts before the Vikings came here. Icelandic has many relics from Gaelic including a -ll sound that's pronounced like -tl whereas in the Scandinavian languages -ll is always pronounced softer without a click-blow sound like the Welsh/Icelandic -ll.
Guthni is a rather common Icelandic name to this day
"the noticeable lack of priests" LMFAO i almost peed from laughing so hard
As an archaeologist since 1985, it is clear that extensive sea work must be done to assess lost lands and their significance.
Very nice vid!!! What's up next?
Thank you! You'll have to wait for the next poll, I'm not 100% certain yet
@@CambrianChroniclesAh...the tyranny of democracy...😅😅
To anyone planning a sea passage to/from/past Aberystwyth, BEWARE : do not believe him when he says those two islands 'do not exist' ! There are several large rocky areas just below the sea surface at low tide in those areas that could seriously damage a keeled sailing ship, or anything with a significant draft passing over at low tides. Perhaps the 'islands' have no trees or habitations on, but they are there, and not easy to spot in fog....
I loved listening to him pronouncing the Welsh names. That language is so musical.
The unbeknownst truth that most people are unaware of is that the Celtic/Gaelic language, especially the Welsh language is very similar to how Ancient Chaldean/Hebrew was phonetically spoken in contrast to the more recent "Yiddish" form of Hebrew.
Modern hebrew does not sound anything like original Hebrew.
@@jakerobinhoodson4136 I think that ancient Hebrew was the original language.
I always find Wales really interesting. A little over half my ancestry is Welch. My Grandfather's grandparents came from an area by a town called Monmouth. He can even speak a few word of welch. When I was younger he would tell me stories his grandparents told him about Wales. For context I am from a small town in the American West.
Welsh.
i used t live nr. there. tis v. pretty. Monmouth means 'mouth of the monnow' as it joins the Wye river at this point. worth a visit if ur ever in the u.k.
@@drychafFor years Welch and Welsh were used interchangeably in America. It is like Scots and Scotch or Deutsch and Dutch. Both of which are still used today (most notably Pennsylvania Dutch and Scotch-Irish.) After all, Welsh comes from the Saxon word for foreigner, if we are going by the names other people give to the Brythonic inhabitants of Cymru, how is one more "correct" than the other? Welsh, Welch, and Walsh all mean the same thing.
@@ulfskinn1458 Terms evolve. Today the standard English terms are Welsh, Scots and Dutch. From wiki: Many Scots dislike the term Scotch and some consider it offensive. As for Dutch and Deutsch, they are terms for two different languages and cannot be used interchangably without causing confusion. As much as I would prefer to be know as a Cymro (Welsh language for 'a Welshman'), in today's English, the term Welsh is the accepted term. Welsch is a relic. Terms evolve, and consistency aids clarity. The term is 'Welsh'.
@@drychaf Languages are fluid, living things and what is "standard" doesn't mean jack to most people's vernacular. No one truly speaks "standard English", it exists only as a literary language. I can tell you are not from America, but many people here still refer to something Scottish as "Scotch", especially in terms of ancestry. The ethnic group called Ulster-Scots in Northern Ireland are called Scotch-Irish in the US. The same goes for "Dutch," which commonly referred to Germans, not Hollanders (from Low German "Dütsch", meaning "Deutsch" or German.) The term is still used by people today to describe a colonial-era German identity. Finns from northern Minnesota are often called "Finlanders" despite the term not being "standard." And of course, in certain communities "Welch" refers to that ethnic group originating from around the Cambrian mountains in Western Britain. The point is that different people in different areas have different names for things, and touting some "standard" literary language as the "correct" way to speak or write is bizarre to me. Just because a number of urban intellectuals use certain words doesn't mean that they are somehow more "correct" than others. It's also especially weird when the term in question is a meaningless exonym in the first place.
Sounds like it's time to settle all of it with a comprehensive series of archeological projects in the sea.
Doggerland needs to be explored as well. Because of the sheer size and depth of it, that would be a massive, and decades, or century long dig, in itself. To say nothing of everywhere else on earth. Such as Adam's Bridge, otherwise known as Rama Setu, near Sri Lanka.
Just as today, in the past, a disproportionate percentage and numerical amount of humanity seems to have preferred to live on the absolute edges of various coastlines around the world.
This means, as the various ice ages ended, their settlements and ancient kingdoms were naturally swallowed up by the rising seas.
Which means, we've been limiting our archeological studies to what was merely convenient, or technologically possible, given our limited technical capabilities, and limited funds. But as our technology improves, we can, and should, start digging and exploring our most comprehensive histories, which I am convinced lie just under the shallow oceans and seas, and lakes of the world.
The bulk of humanity's history, and the most ancient of it, is not merely buried, it is submerged!
We've only, heretofore, been studying the most convenient parts of it!
Most of our most ancient legends lie underneath the waves. And we need to find and study them.
oh im so glad youtube recommended your channel today im literally crying this is the best videos ive seen in a long long time
Wow, thank you, I'm glad you like them!
I stayed in a water front hotel in Aberystwyth, New Years 1985, and it is easy to believe the sea reclaimed land there. The wind was brutal and had already taken the far end of the street - many building inhabitable.
Not even closly related,but old Croatian folklore has an idea on how our islands were formed, some say that gigants were throwing the rock in to the sea,orhers laiter chaonged the story to God doing that.
its interesting that you mention a tsunami occuring at that time as ive heard of a similar event occuring in south Kerry Eire where a large lake was formed, in the process swamping a settlement now lost under the lake (Waterville lake). i had thought it just a story, but now im thinkin otherwise... Also, those ancient lost kindoms probably spent generations building up ramparts against the rising sea levels only t finally lose out to the cataclysm of a tsunami... a magnetic survey wd probably help... Great vid tho, thanx!
This is really fascinating ,how it all corresponds with actual coastal features
I am a great fan of old legends and the work of professor Tolkien and it's really interesting to hear about Taliesin and about the destruction of Beleriand in significantly more realistic/historical version.
Your videos on Welsh History are so interesting,they got me interested on the language.
Thank you, that’s great to hear!