The drowning of ‘Lyonesse’: early legends of land submergence in southwest Britain and geoscience

Abstract

Stories about a submerged land named Lyonesse abound in culture traditions of Southwest Britain and plausibly derive from memories of land loss within the Scilly Isles. We review Lyonesse stories, their links to Arthurian romances and Greek/Roman accounts of the Cassiterides, and trace their divergent evolution. From this region’s history of land-sea movements and human occupation, we propose Lyonesse stories originated more than 4000 years ago when rising sea level divided a single inhabited island in the Scilly group. The comparable antiquity of similar stories isa compelling reason for supposing Lyonesse stories originated from observations of submergence encoded in cultural memories through oral traditions that endured in intelligible form for several millennia to reach us today.