THE ESCAPE OF KING GRADLON FROM THE FLOODED CITY OF YS
An ancient ballad on the subject, which, however, bears marks of having been tampered with, states, on the other hand, that Gradlon led his people into extravagances of every kind, and that Dahut received the key from him, the misuse of which precipitated the catastrophe. Dahut, the ballad continues, became a mermaid and haunted the waters which roll over the site of the city where she loved and feasted. “Fisherman,” ends the ballad, “have you seen the daughter of the sea combing her golden hair in the midday sun 187 at the fringes of the beach?” “Yes,” replies the fisherman, “I have seen the white daughter of the sea, and I have heard her sing, and her songs were plaintive as the sound of the waves.”
The legend of Ys, of the town swallowed up by the sea, is common to the several branches of the Celtic race. In Wales the site of the submerged city is in Cardigan Bay, and in Ireland it is Lough Neagh, as Tom Moore says:
On Lough Neagh’s bank as the fisherman strays,
When the clear, cold eve’s declining,
He sees the round towers of other days
In the wave beneath him shining.
This legend had its rise in an extraordinary story which was given currency to by Giraldus Cambrensis in his Topography of Ireland, to the effect that a certain extremely wicked tribe were punished for their sins by the inundation of their territory.