A Book of North Wales

by S. Baring-Gould

Penmaenmawr, to the west of Conway, is a favourite watering-place, and takes its name from the hill, 1,180 feet high, that rises steeply from the sea and commands a tract like Cantref y Gwaelod, that was about the same time overflowed by the sea. The story told of this sunken land is that King Helig was feasting with his lords and ladies where now lies the sandbank bearing his name, when the cellarer, having gone down to broach another cask, rushed up the steps in terror at finding the cellar under water, and he shouted, “The sea! the sea is on us!” The panic-stricken revellers fled for their lives, and as they issued from the palace heard the roar of the waves and could see the gleam of the manes of the white horses as they overleaped the sea wall.

Half a mile from Penmaenmawr is Trwyn-y-wylfa, the Headland of Wailing, for there the survivors congregated and looked over a tumbling sea that covered what had once been fair pastures and quiet homesteads. Tyno Helig, the lost land of Helig, stretched between Puffin Island and Penmaenmawr; and the Lavan sandbank covers a portion of it. The story reappears in many places with variations. In Brittany the same is told of King Grallo. He was warned to fly from his palace by S. Winwaloe, as the vengeance of Heaven would fall on it on account of the disorderly life of his daughter Ahes, and there the sea encroached and overwhelmed the palace and town.

But the most curious instance of the reduplication of the story is found in the marshes of Dol, in Brittany, where is a little lake which, in popular belief, covers a great city, and it is called la Crevée de Saint Guinou. Here we have actually the name of Gwyddno transferred to Lesser Britain. The colonists must have carried the story with them to their new home, and located it there. The morass was not formed till an inundation that took place in 709. The whole of Mount’s Bay, in Cornwall, was also at one time land, and William of Worcester, in his Itinerary, wrote: “All this region was once covered with dense forest, and extended six miles from the sea, a suitable place for wild beasts, and in which at one time lived monks serving God.”

The existence of submarine forests along this north coast of Wales and in Cardigan Bay, as well as off the south coast of Cornwall, may have originated the legend of the sunken land. In 1893, for instance, after a gale, a submerged forest was disclosed at Rhyl, nearly a mile east of the pier. But it is also quite possible that the tradition preserves the memory of a real subsidence.

In Brittany the sinking of the land is still going on. In an island of the Morbihan are two circles of standing stones. One is already half under water, and the other is completely submerged. At Locmariaquer a Roman camp is almost wholly engulfed, and Roman constructions of a villa that were observed and described in 1727 are now permanently under water.

But the submerged forests belong to a much earlier period than the sixth century, though to a time when man lived on the land and hunted in these forests. Gerald of Windsor, in the twelfth century, was puzzled at the revelation of trees beneath the waters of S. Bride’s Bay. He says:—

“The sandy shores of South Wales being laid bare by the extraordinary violence of a storm, the surface of the earth which had been covered for many ages reappeared, and discovered the trunks of trees cut off, standing in the sea itself, the strokes of the hatchet appearing as if only made yesterday; the soil was very black and the wood like ebony.”

Among the bones found in these underwater forests are those of the brown bear and the stag; the trees were Scotch firs, oaks, yews, willows, and birches, and they show by the way they have fallen, with their heads pointing to the east, that the prevailing wind, then as now, was from the west. The size of the trees proves that they must have grown at some considerable distance from the sea-board. Indeed, the forest land can be pretty well made out. The whole of Cardigan Bay was above the sea, and the promontory of Lleyn and Bardsey were heights rising out of the woodland. The stretch of forest extended a long way to the north of Wales, and the coasts of Lancashire and Cheshire were many miles further out to sea than they are now. The men who chased in this primeval forest used flint weapons; the age of metal had not then dawned.

According to Montelius of Stockholm an absolute chronology can now be given for periods of prehistoric civilisation in Europe, because Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages are contemporaneous with an historic period in Egypt and Western Asia, and also because numerous points of connection are known between the different parts of Europe and the East from the beginning of the Copper Age onwards.