CHAPTER XX

THE LOST LAND OF KING ARTHUR, LYONNESSE, ATLANTIS

TORIES of monkish origin assert that St. Michael's Mount was once a tall rock situated in a wood. If you look at the Ordnance Map you will find by Marazion, in old English type, "Submarine forest." Old writers who knew nothing of modern science thought it probable that the marshy nature of the soil up to the hills on the eastern side of Mount's Bay was due to the sea having once flowed up to them.

Dr. Borlase (Natural History of Cornwall, pp. 220, 222) says:

"In the year 1750, John Roberts, of the parish of Senan, digging for tin near Velindreath, found, at the depth of thirty feet, an entire skeleton, about the bigness of that of a large deer, but such a set of bones as he had never before observed. The beast lay on its side, and near it, in a line parallel to its vertebræ, a prostrate tree of twenty feet long about the diameter of a moderate man's waist; great numbers of leaves were on the branches, some large, some small, and the impression of the leaves was plain in the earth. The tree was of the oak kind."

Mr. Borlase thought this burial of the deer and tree due either to a deluge which "unfooted the tree, and drowned the creature and retiring, drew them both towards the ocean, or by some sudden subsidence of the shelving part of the hill, when the land sinking, hurried away both the creature and the tree in one direction.' And then he says: 66 That there was anciently a sudden subsidence of the ground in these parts, has been a constant tradition for some ages."

On January 10th, 1757 (that is the year before his book was published), midway betwixt the piers of St. Michael's Mount and Penzance appeared "the remains of the wood which, according to tradition, covered anciently a large

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tract of ground on the edge of Mount's Bay." The sands, it seems, had been drawn off from the shore by a violent sea and had left several places, twenty yards long and ten wide, washed bare, strewed with stones like a broken causeway. Mr. Borlase examined the spot and found parts of ancient trees. In the first pool part of the trunk appeared, and the whole course of the roots, eighteen feet long and twelve wide, was displayed in a horizontal position; upon spading round we found the sand to be a thin layer of ten inches deep, and then the natural earth appeared, in which the roots remained so firmly fixed" that he had to use a pick and crow of iron to see further.

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The place where he made this observation was three hundred yards below full-sea-mark; the water is twelve feet deep upon them when the tide is in." From these observations he concluded that the ground there had sunk more than twelve feet, and confirmed the tradition that formerly a wood stretched from the town of Penzance to St. Michael's Mount. This, then, accounts for the mystic words in the Ordnance Map, “ Submarine forest.”

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This Lyonnesse is amply reported by tradition to have been a region of extreme fertility uniting the western part of Cornwall with the Scilly Islands. Tradition is uncertain as to when the cataclysm occurred, but Saxon chronicles say Lyonnesse was destroyed by a high tide on November 11th, 1099. This fertile stretch of country, another Atlantis, was an important part of the realm of King Arthur. This is the land of Tennyson's fancy; the

where

had fallen

"Land of old, upheaven from the abyss
By fire, to sink unto abyss again,"

"All day long the noise of battle roll'd

Among the mountains by the winter sea,
Till all King Arthur's Table, man by man,"

"Around their lord, King Arthur."

The appearance of St. Michael's Mount, its configuration, the abruptness with which it rises from the sea, are features singularly like those of other solitary rocks in the neighbourhood. The rocks around the Longships Lighthouse off Land's End, the Brisons off Cape Cornwall, the Gull

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and Bishop Rocks at Kynance Cove at the Lizard, Castle Bryher and Hangsman's Island in the Scilly Islands, are each and all miniature St. Michael's Mounts. But even these are merely samples, types of a vast number of similar rocks standing out in the sea round the Land's End district.

Go a little further afield, or rather seaward, and the same striking similarity must have been noticed by every observant traveller.

On the French coast opposite, Mont St. Michel is a complete replica of our St. Michael's Mount. The picture of the one may well be taken, at a first glance, for the other. There are other isolated rocks on the Brittany coast which similarly are miniature Monts St. Michel. The Cornish axis of hills is continued in the Scilly Isles and away across the Channel. Geologists have written in the past that the Lyonnesse existed only in imagination. But not for nothing are these extraordinary similarities. Old scientists, as ruthless as the ocean itself, have swept away all the beautiful legendary tales and traditions and led us to believe that only what we now see was. They would have had us believe that it was a pure fiction that one Trevillian swam on shore during the inundation, and in memory thereof the family bears for its arms, gules, a horse argent, issuing out of the sea. This story was a delightful, but self-evolved, tale to account for the unusual coat of arms. But there is no smoke without fire. Every old traditional story has some true kernel to be got out if only you can find it.

Modern scientific men, geologists in particular, have now quite changed round through taking into account more factors in the equation than their predecessors. Of these Mr. Mackinder is a notable and excellent example, and his book and other authorities conclusively prove that once upon a time Land's End, the Scillies, and Brittany were all united.

The physical history of Britain as defined by modern geographies is that the British Isles are a recent continental island group, or, in other words, a fragment of the neighbouring continent, and have been divided from it only in a recent epoch. The structure of these islands can only be understood if regarded as continuous with that of the Con

tinent. The British Isles have the same fauna and flora, and the separating seas are shallow.

A map of the British Isles in the Carboniferous epoch shows all of the south of England, except the Land's End district of Cornwall, under water. As time progressed in the Jurassic epoch the whole of Cornwall became land, and in the Tertiary epoch the British Isles stand out as a vast continent-the continent of Atlantis, the sea just intruding in a narrow and not long fiord about where the Isle of Wight now is. Then came the Ice Age, and after that epoch Britain emerged in broad connection with Europe. Then at last, after the renewed submergence of the North Sea area and the formation of the channels, the Strait of Dover was cut by the waves and we became insular.

We may therefore rest content that the traditions of Arthur and his lost territory are not mere solar myths or vain imaginings of a poetic people, but are in their essentials trustworthy records of past history.

In Notes and Queries for April 13th and 20th, 1861, pp. 281, 301, there is a learned article on King John and the monastery of St. Matthew. The church of St. Buryan"ecclesia Sancte Beriane "-was apparently charged with the annual payment of a hundred shillings, "Monachis de Sancto Matheo de Finibus-terrarum in Britannia ibidem Deo "-to the monks of the Land's End in Britannia-that means, of course, Brittany or Bretagne. The monks of St. Matthew, de Finibus-terrarum, were those of the ancient Benedictine abbey of St. Matthew at the most western extremity of Brittany. The department of Finistère, the writer remarks in a note in Notes and Queries, comprises very nearly the same portions of the province of Brittany as had belonged to the diocese of St. Pol de Leon and Quimper, which again answered respectively to the ancient districts of Leonois and Cornuaille. The juxtaposition of these names is noteworthy, and "almost leads one to suspect that the strange tradition respecting the Cornish 'Lionesse' may have originated in some Breton legend."

Mr. A. Hadrian Allcroft, in his recently (1908) published Earthwork of England, is also of opinion (p. 28) that the tradition of a submerged kingdom of Lyonnesse which once

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stretched from Land's End to the Scillies has no support in geological facts, for the subsidence of that area, he asserts, dates from a period immeasurably earlier than the legend. He goes on to say as the writer in Notes and Queries hinted years ago-that the Lyonnesse of medieval romance was in Brittany. Negative evidence in such a matter is of very little value, however, and the positive evidence of the very widespread belief in the Lyonnesse story among Cornish folk of all ages is just as worthy of consideration.