Footprints from Atlantis (Sea Levels & Submerged Forests) Paul Dunbavin (2023) Summary: The history of Holocene sea level changes along the eastern Irish Sea coast continues to be neglected even as those of the North Sea belatedly attract attention from archaeologists seeking drowned Mesolithic sites. There is no reason why the Irish Sea should not offer equal potential for submerged archaeology – but for the preconceptions that have accumulated in the underlying sciences. Two recent articles (2022) in scientific media offer an opportunity for some renewed scrutiny and criticism of what has gone before. One is a detailed survey of early Holocene footprints at Formby Point near Liverpool and the other, a new view on the legend of Cantre’r Gwaelod and ‘lost islands’ off the coast of Cardigan Bay. These are both specialist academic studies, but they need to be put into a wider context and some of the assumptions and omissions of earlier investigators re-examined. As any visitor to the North Wales or Lancashire coast will find, the view offshore is now blighted by the sight of windfarms on the horizon; all constructed on the shallow flat seabed of the eastern Irish Sea, which has received little archaeological survey of its potential for submerged Mesolithic and Neolithic occupation. All along these sandy coasts, from mid-Wales to Cumbria, examples of submerged forests have been recorded since Medieval times, as investigated by the pioneer twentieth century investigators: Clement Reid, J.A. Steers, Harry Godwin and Ronald Kay Gresswell but many of these forest exposures have since been lost to the waves; others must remain buried onshore and offshore beneath the deep mud and sand of this flat coastline. Since the 1990s fossil prehistoric human and animal footprints have been revealed on the beach at Formby Point north of Liverpool. [1] The first detailed study of these footprints was published in the 2022 study in Nature Ecology and Evolution. [2] It is the result of a detailed survey 2010-2016 focusing on the ecology and refereed by specialists in that field. However here, within a cross-disciplinary analysis for a wider audience, encompassing history and mythology as well as other sciences, I shall only summarise their published conclusions; such brevity is essential in order to hold the interest of specialists in other disciplines and of the general reader. The ancient beach at Formby and nearby Hightown is regularly exposed as the tidal range varies by as much as 10m and from time-to-time storms uncover new features of various ages. The footprints were preserved in mud and silt that was deposited in the saltmarsh environment of an intertidal lagoon formed “some time before 6,000 cal BP” but which was “gradually submerged” [3] For their base of sea level science the ecologists rely upon published sea-level studies, which will be further discussed below. The consensus would be that the ancient beach and lagoon date from the Mesolithic (i.e. preagriculture earlier than c.6000 BP) with the later surfaces dating from the Neolithic or early medieval periods; the animal footprints date from the Mesolithic and early Neolithic while the human footprints date from 5440-5050 BP. [4] The wild animal footprints are described as mainly those of red and roe deer trampling in the mudflats, but also of aurochs, boar or pig, wolf/dog and a few wading birds. Mammal diversity is observed to decrease from Mesolithic to the Neolithic as the evidence of human activity increased. However, hooves of domesticated cattle are noted only in the later-dated examples; the decline in large mammal population is ascribed to an increased human presence and habitat modification. Another interesting conclusion from the survey is the preponderance of footprints from the older Mesolithic layers walking parallel to the presumed ancient coast, while the majority of later tracks (around 75%) tend to be walking to or from the sea. [5] The study suggests that at nearby Hightown (5290-4860 cal BP) the people were using boats or a wharf of some kind, perhaps engaged in fishing; although one doubts that the animals were such keen anglers. This would be in line with the current sea-level research base, which suggests that the Neolithic coastline prior to c.6000 BP lay somewhat further west than today; only reaching its present position when the sand barriers were eroded as the lagoon was drowned and subsequently infilled. <- Left Fossil Footprints at Formby Point A view from the Spirallingleaf website. taken in 2016. showing some of the Formby human footprints Other excellent close-up photographs of the animal footprints are also available on the site. © Spirallingleaf Many of the key diagrams and pictures from the footprints study are also available in various newspaper reviews ********* Note however that evidence taken solely from the modern coastline cannot prove how far to the west the sea may have receded during the Neolithic. The ecology researchers accept the prevailing science that during the early post-glacial (Mesolithic) period (c.10000 BP) the coastline lay some 30km further to the west. They follow the established view that during the Mesolithic era the sea-level was “rapidly rising” and that by the Neolithic it had risen gradually to modern shores. They comment that this rise was “coeval with the existence of Doggerland to the east”. A specialist study, in this case ecology, requires a starting point and in this instance it commences from established opinions of how sea level in the Irish Sea and Liverpool Bay has varied since the removal of the Pleistocene ice sheet. As such, it sits upon a base of specialist assumptions that have grown-up over the last century from glaciology, geology, oceanography and also, astronomy. While ecology specialists may decline to question the experts of other disciplines, a cross-disciplinary researcher has to dig deeper to seek a consistent pattern across all the contradictory sources of evidence. Submerged Forests Around Irish Sea and Welsh coasts are found the remains of submerged forests beneath the beach sand. While this term would encompass any terrestrial vegetation beneath a beach, in this case the deposits were mainly fallen tree trunks and their stumps still in-situ. Inland from Formby Point the remains of oak and birch trees may be found in the Lancashire peat. The dead trees were first noted by the local pastor, Reverend James in 1636; and in 1796, the report of an anonymous correspondent to Gentleman’s Magazine was noted by Gresswell, here quoted in abridgement: There is a great curiosity in the neighbourhood of Liverpool...It is the remains of a large forest, six miles north of Liverpool, upon the shore, near Crosby Point, extending at present upwards of a mile towards Formby. What might have been its original extent in that or in any other direction, seems at present impossible to ascertain...vestiges of it are visible, dipping westwardly even into the sea...there are numberless trunks of trees, standing upright in the very places where they must have grown, with their prodigious roots extending into the ground in all directions... The correspondent goes on to suggest that this forest was the same as could be observed at Meols on the north coast of the Wirral – he even enclosed a drawing with his letter. [6] Although much of the forest exposure around Crosby has since degraded, Gresswell recorded a fallen oak in 1946, with a length of 43 feet and a diameter of 15 inches. Whatever event devastated this ancient woodland also left the fallen trunks predominantly oriented southwest to northeast. The recent footprints study does not comment on these features inland from the modern beach at Formby, though we may see from the above 1796 quote that the forest exposures extended beneath the modern beach sand, close to where the footprints occur; evidently the coastline of that period was somewhere further west than today as was again remarked by Gresswell. There has been a general impression that the forest…grew mainly on the landward side of the mossland…This is in spite of the exposure of the “submerged” forests on the present beach whenever erosion brought the sea farther eastward than it had recently been. [7] Submerged forests in the mosslands inland of Formby Point, Lancashire. Gresswell’s map (figure 4 on page 72 of his 1957 paper) showing the locations of his peat borings. It also illustrates the position of his ‘Hillhouse Coast’, the notch in the Shirdlley Hill sand that he believed to mark the furthest inland penetration of the sea during the Mesolithic (Boreal) period. Nearer the sea these ancient woodlands are hidden beneath a deep layer of mud and sand. He further remarks how, in the nineteenth century, local farmers and labourers would have to take saws and axes with them, as well as their spades, in order to remove the logs and stumps. The ancient fallen trees, with roots in-situ, resemble the ‘ghost forests’ along the Canadian Pacific coast, which result from tectonic movements after subduction earthquakes and tsunamis [8] However, there are no active geological faults in the Irish Sea. A tsunami wave from an earthquake on the distant mid-Atlantic ridges cannot be ruled out, which could have inundated the coastal lagoon. However, tsunamis are only transitory events; mature trees could survive for decades, with their roots immersed in brackish water, perhaps to be blown over by later storms long after they had died. The preservation of submerged forest deposits implies that they must have been immediately covered by protective sand dunes. [* see note 1] Modern scientific study only really commences with the work of Clement Reid in 1913. [9] His book, simply entitled: ‘Submerged Forests’, focused mainly on the North Sea land bridge to the continent and the map of Doggerland that is so often reproduced. He remarked on the Neolithic transition from submerged forests to the raised beaches found in northern England and Scotland. This apparent northsouth tilt would be explained by the ‘isostatic recovery’ of the highland land mass after the Pleistocene ice burden melted away. Steers noted the so-called 25-foot ‘Neolithic Beach’ from Cumbria northward. The submerged forests further north, for example those in Orkney, date from earlier in the Holocene between 8000-6000 BP according to more recent studies. [10] In 1938 Godwin, studied the submerged forests at Borth and Ynyslas along the coast of Cardigan Bay and subsequently adopted the Blytt–Sernander pollen zones as first developed by Danish climate researchers. [11] The Welsh site is superficially similar to that proposed at Formby, of a forest preserved on dry land behind a protective barrier that was rapidly overwhelmed by the sea. He noted the change in species from predominantly elm at Borth Bog to oak at Ynyslas. Godwin’s own words are again useful to quote as an example of how the concept of a submerged forest period of lowered sea levels during the warm Neolithic came to the fore. The long developmental sequence shown by the submerged forest peat argues a long period of freedom from the marine influence under which the basal clay was deposited. Thus after the great submergence of the Boreal period, during which the North Sea was created, there must have been a considerable period before subsidence affected the sites now described. The term submergence is used here throughout, without any attempt to distinguish the eustatic and isostatic components of the movements of land and sea-level. The view of the pioneering investigators was extended by Gresswell in the post-war decades. [12] It was widely believed that the drowned valleys of the Rivers Ribble and Mersey-Dee after the Ice Age could be discerned on the Admiralty depth charts as far out as the ‘22-fathom line’ (c.40m depth) some thirty miles west of the present coast; these channels being overlain by more recent sand and mud nearer the modern coast. This concept of a ‘submerged forest period’ during the mid-Holocene (Neolithic) was the understanding that one would find in any textbook or museum display of this era. These would typically depict the Isle of Man linked to the Cumbria coast – and even the possibility of a land-bridge to Ireland further north. The contemporary view of J.A. Steers who extensively studied all the coasts of Britain and Ireland, was that the date when Britain finally separated from Ireland was as recent as the Boreal transgression (Mesolithic) as here again quoted in abridgement. [13] At what stage in post-glacial times did the final separation of Ireland take place? This can be answered with some certainty as Boreal. Godwin’s work on the coastal peats and submerged forests has demonstrated that in the North Sea area there has been a rise of sea level of at least 170 feet...the rise of the sea continued during Boreal Times (Zone VI) and surpassed the present level and eventually formed the 25-foot raised beach of northern England and Scotland…the 25-foot beach indicates a maximum and that since this time present conditions have evolved. In the pre-radiocarbon era the pollen sequences could only be dated as a floating chronology, using the pollen zones for Britain as adapted by Godwin. The radiocarbon dates would then be further refined by tree-ring calibration in the 1970s. We may see that the deciduous oak and birch forests must date from the climatic optimum of the Atlantic pollen zone and the older deposits from the Boreal climate era, as pine and birch forests first colonised the formerly tundra landscape. The cause of these abrupt climate transitions remains as much of an enigma as the sea level changes. Pollen Zones of the European Holocene Zone Pollen Dates Vegetation Archaeology X Sub-Atlantic 500 BC to today Grass/woodland Iron Age/ modern VIII Sub-Boreal 3000–500 BC Mixed oak Bronze Age/ Iron Age VII Atlantic 5500 -3000 BC Mixed oak/elm Neolithic/ Bronze Age V & VI Boreal c.7700–5500 BC Pine/birch Mesolithic IV Pre-Boreal c.8300–7700 BC Birch forest Early Mesolithic III Younger Dryas c.8800-8300 BC Tundra Late Palaeolithic I Allerød c.9800-8800 BC Tundra/ birch Late Palaeolithic Ic Older Dryas c.10,000-9800 BC Tundra Late Palaeolithic Ib Bølling c.10,500-10,000 BC Tundra Late Palaeolithic Ia Earlier Dryas c.13,000-10,500 BC Tundra Late Palaeolithic The defined zones of pollen, vegetation and human archaeology do not correspond and precise transitions are vague. We are here concerned primarily with the Atlantic and Boreal zones for which the transitions were sharp, as was the Younger Dryas which marks the boundary from Ice Age to Holocene conditions as the British and Irish ice sheets finally melted. The submerged forest on the Wirral coast near Dove Point (Meols) formerly extended over hundreds of square metres, perhaps as far as Hilbre Island, and was radiocarbon dated to 6420±60 BP. [14]; the exposures are remembered in the local street names. On the Lancashire coast inland from Formby the woody peat deposits at Downholland Moss were dated by Tooley as 6890±55 bp (uncalibrated) as published in a Historic England database. [15] Unfortunately, field researchers seldom record from which tree ring the wood was taken; the sample could come from any point in the long lifetime of the tree and so cannot provide a precise date of submergence. [* see Note 1] The advent of radiocarbon dates revealed that submerged forests formed at various periods due to differing causes, which may disguise the nature of any individual event. For this, and other reasons, the concept of a single ‘submerged forest period’ during the warm Neolithic fell out of favour. Holocene Sea Level Changes in the Irish Sea To appreciate how the current consensus has evolved and why opinions about Holocene land-bridges to Ireland and the Isle of Man have changed, requires an appreciation of how the underlying science has progressed from the 1950s onward; and also why some opinions of the eminent contributors have endured, while yet others have fallen away. Up to the 1960s it was not possible to compare sea level data from around the world. However as more carbon-14 dates became available it became clear that the regional sea-level curves did not correspond and the search for a single worldwide eustatic sea level curve was abandoned. The focus for field investigators then switched to determining local vertical ‘isostatic’ uplift of the land that must be disguising the anticipated pattern of eustasy. The cause of these supposed local movements was always left suitably vague but would typically be referred-to as ‘glacial isostasy’. Gresswell’s detailed work on the Lancashire coast was pre-radiocarbon; it also pre-dated the emerging theory of plate tectonics and the Milankovitch astronomical theory of ice ages. Building upon the work of the earlier investigators he envisaged a high post-glacial sea level at the Lancashire coast with the Irish Sea extending inland to the limit of the peat and forest deposits of Downholland Moss, to cut a notch in the soft till around Hillhouse farm; thus he termed it the Hillhouse Coast. [16] He inferred (from the straightening of river courses onshore) that the sea-level must then have dropped and receded far out to the west during the warm Atlantic pollen zone (Neolithic) in order to explain the submerged river channels and land bridges. On this emergent plain the oak/birch forests flourished. The sea level returned close to modern shores during the later Neolithic, creating the lagoons and rapidly drowning the forests. Radiocarbon and tree-ring dating also allowed the floating pollen chronology to be dated (see chart above). Previously, the naïve theory that huge polar ice caps had melted-away and raised the worldwide sea level was taken as a given. In formerly glaciated regions the apparent tilting of former shorelines (such as the ‘25-foot beach’ ) could be explained by isostatic rebound following the removal of the ice burden. However, the precise date and extent of the lost ice sheets remained tentative. Carbon dating from the 1960s onwards allowed oceanographers such as Shepard and Fairbridge to date the post-glacial sea level rise and estimate how much this had affected the level of the world ocean. [17] A worldwide eustatic rise of some 120m since the Ice Age became the consensus and so the regional studies for the Irish Sea and elsewhere had to be brought into line with this new oceanography. It was considered that since the North Sea land bridge to Europe was severed during the Boreal period then the Irish Sea basin must have been similarly inundated by that date. This revision of thinking left no scope for a ‘submerged forest period’ nor for Holocene land Bridges to Ireland and the Isle of Man. In the 1960’s and subsequent decades the most prominent investigators in this limited field were Michael J Tooley and Ian Shennan. Tooley’s 1978 book remains the standard text on the Irish Sea coast. His books and papers make heavy reading but there can be no doubt that his field work was detailed and extensive. Tooley was moved to set aside the work of Gresswell and the other pioneers. His view was constrained by the then-prevailing ‘eustatic’ mechanism, whereby the sea level was expected to rise and fall uniformly all over the globe due solely to the melting and freezing of the ice caps. Any evidence that contradicted this eustatic sea level could therefore only be due to the local ‘isostatic’ adjustments of the land. These assumptions are a feature of almost all sea level studies and not a criticism of Tooley alone. He dismissed the Hillhouse Coast as a fiction because he could not envisage a mechanism that could flood the brackish coastal lagoon. The justification in his 1974 paper; [18] as repeated in his 1978 book are worthwhile to quote: In order to reconcile the evidence presented here with the position of the Hillhouse coastline…it would be necessary to evoke a mechanism by which storm waves rose more than six metres from a quiet water, sedimentary environment, in which brackish water clays were accumulating, to cut a notch in the till at Hillhouse, at least a thousand years after sedimentation ended at HH-6. Such a mechanism is wholly untenable, and the requirements for erosion at HH-3 contradict those for deposition at HH-6, separated by only 600 metres. … In order to reconcile these data…it is necessary to explain how sea-level could have risen another 6 metres…and penetrated landward 1.3 km more than a thousand years after the last marine transgression recorded the furthest to the east in this area… [19] A major regression of the sea from Boreal to Atlantic times (therefore perhaps also closing the Irish Sea once-again) was too much for the conservative Tooley. He instead considered that the sea had withdrawn only a few metres before returning in stages to present shores. Gresswell’s Hillhouse Coast became just the shore of the trapped coastal lagoon. However, it is also important to note the further admission in his 1978 conclusions (p 201). [20] Mörner (1976b) has drawn attention to the fact that the geoid pattern – the distribution and amplitude of the high and low values – is not stable in geological time…The implications for sea-level studies are apparent: the free ocean surface can intersect different continents simultaneously at different absolute altitudes…and the changing pattern of the geoid may occasion a record of a marine transgression or regression, when no addition or abstraction of water to the ocean basins has occurred. Here then, is the missing ‘mechanism’ that could cause an apparent rise or fall of local sea level without resort to either polar ice or isostasy. Geoid-eustasy (by whatever cause) raises the real possibility that the shallow eastern Irish Sea could indeed have remained exposed at the same time as the North Sea ‘Doggerland’ was drowned. The concepts of geoid-eustasy and glacio-isostasy only came to the fore in the 1970s in the work of Nils Axel Mörner [21] He introduced the term ‘geoid eustasy’ to explain sea level variations due to ice melt and abstraction, together with other possible geological and astronomical influences upon the flattened ellipsoid of the rotating earth (the geoid). These would cause the axis of figure (the axis of maximum moment of inertia) to be displaced. The rotation axis must then hunt to align with it, thus triggering a pole shift or apparent long-term polar drift. This mechanism would produce a worldwide pattern of sea level correspondence in alternate quarter-spheres, obviating the need to introduce unexplained isostatic variations to justify every local divergence from eustasy. In subsequent studies researchers might include Mörner’s papers in their references, as did Tooley (see quote above). However it is clear that few researchers understood the theory. The vague references to ‘isostatic uplift’, etc, may still be found in later regional sea level studies. In 1976, Farrell and Clarke (contemporary with Mörner’s work) derived a ‘sea-level equation’ that has since been developed by others into a deglaciation modelling technique. [22] The theory of geoidaleustasy has become absorbed in the extended concepts of glacio-isostasy, based on the weight of polar ice bearing upon the land and the extra pressure that meltwater exerted on local and distant ocean basins. Since the millennium, researchers have preferred to cite these theories of ‘near field’ and ‘far field’ glaciology to explain the divergences of apparent sea level between the continents. Mörner’s proposal: that some variations to the geoid might be due to causes other than polar ice, has been largely glossed-over. Melting ice is easier to understand than the rotation of the Earth; geomorphologists are not mathematicians and geophysicists seldom take an interest in peat bogs. Despite Tooley’s acknowledgment that geoid-eustasy and glacio-isostasy had undermined many of his own and his contemporaries’ earlier conclusions, he did not revise his previous statements about the evolution of the Lancashire coast. It is Tooley’s fieldwork and conclusions that are now generally cited, as indeed they are in the Formby footprints study. The mathematical modelling has also had consequences for the accepted understanding of coastal evolution since the end of the Ice Age. The view that may be obtained from the database of the British Archaeological Survey is largely based on the modelling by Dr Robin Wingfield as published by HMSO in 1995. [23] His conclusion was that the most recent date at which there could have been a landbridge between Britain and Ireland was around 11350 BP. He envisaged a progressive ‘forebulge’ in the Irish Sea, exposing temporary land bridges perhaps as far south as the Welsh peninsulas. Wingfield summarised the derivation of his own deglaciation model as follows: A simple, geometrically based model is developed of the interaction of: glacio-eustasy, from graphs based on coral-reef studies; glacio-isostatic depression with an annular fore-bulge of equal volume, both contracting through the interval considered; and hydro-isostasy, as an enhancement of the other effects by up to 20%. He was at least modest about the limitations of his model, but once such conclusions are published by a respected academic source they become widely cited as if proven fact. It is modelling and that is all it can be; it was not based on evidence from the seabed. In an earlier article in 2019, I summarised the modern consensus as developed by Wingfield. (see Patterns on the Irish Sea Floor). [24] Wingfield’s modelling (and others) would suggest that the land bridges were severed long before the ice sheets finally disappeared from Ireland and Scotland. [25] At best the vegetation would have been tundra, more like Greenland or Baffin Island today. The current status of modelling (as at 2008) with regard to the opening of the Irish Sea is amply summarised, with illustrations, in the paper by Edwards and Brookes discussed further below. [26] The principal inconsistencies in the current consensus for the eastern Irish Sea are that although we know that the submerged forests of Lancashire and Wales extend beneath the present beaches, we still do not know how far west the sea may have receded during the mid-Holocene warm period. There remains a gap to explain how the various flora and fauna reached Ireland and the Isle of Man after the Pleistocene ice sheets melted; this has been glossed-over. Furthermore, the science does not align with the numerous myths and legends about the Irish Sea that survive from Ireland and Wales. These legends would all demand a warm and equable climate and cannot be describing ice-age or tundra conditions. Cardigan Bay and Cantre'r Gwaelod The second research paper to appear in 2022, in Atlantic Geoscience, examined the evidence for a lost land in Cardigan Bay known as the Lowland Hundred or in Welsh Cantre'r Gwaelod. [27] The lost land was said to lie off the Cardigan coast where the three shingle ridges known as the Sarns: Sarn Badrig, Sarn-y-Bwch and Sarn Cynfelyn are exposed at low tide. To summarise the legend in its modern form, the causeways supposedly led down to a city that lay below sea level, protected behind walls and dikes, which was engulfed during a storm when the sluices were left open. However, it would be a digression to explore these legends in depth here. The inundation of the city is often linked with the submerged forests found around Borth and Ynyslas. Radiocarbon dates from the peat at Borth averaged c.3800 BP and those from Ynyslas somewhat earlier around 5000 BP. [28] The new proposal by Haslett & Willis re-examines the origin of the Sarns and offers a new interpretation of features shown on the fourteenth-century Gough Map held in the Bodleian Library. An online database is now available to the public that interprets its medieval features. The two authors would posit that the lost land of Cantre’r Gwaelod is indicated by two islands shown opposite Aberdovey and Aberystwyth, which mark the approximate position of the Sarns. They would propose that vestiges of the two islands persisted until as recently as the sixteenth century. The ‘lost islands’ study should not be considered as a true cross-disciplinary reconciliation of evidence; rather it is a combined-study by two professors from diverse fields of expertise, each contributing their expert view. It is the academic qualifications of the authors that allow it to find a home in a specialist oceanography journal. While any scientific analysis of legends is to be welcomed, there is simply no need to base a theory around the medieval Gough Map, which can so easily be disparaged by sceptical reviewers in the modern media. The submerged forests around the Welsh coast have been shown by the carbon-14 dates to be of Neolithic age, supporting the conclusion of North as long ago as the 1950s that the lost city legends have diverged from memories of a single ancient event. [29] A simplified extract from the medieval Gough Map showing only the relevant detail. The full map and database may be accessed by clicking on the link or picture. Experts interpret the misplaced islands in Cardigan Bay as Gwylan I. and St Tudwal’s I. The two small islands apparently lying in Liverpool Bay are identified as Priestholm (off Anglesey) and Hilbre Island (Dee estuary). The ease with which the Gough Map connection can be demolished will only add to the dismissive attitude that is sadly the norm whenever the ancient legends are discussed by other scientists. No such islands or sandbanks were mentioned by Gerald of Wales a century earlier in his itinerary of the coast, nor were they recorded by Ptolemy in Roman times. The opinion of experts at the Bodleian Library (based on analysis of faint partial-text on the original map) is that the two islands shown in Cardigan Bay are misplaced (and oversized) representations of the tiny Gwylan and St Tudwal’s Islands. The medieval writing is hard to see on printed reproductions. As may be seen from the relevant-extract of the Gough map shown above, there appear to be two other misplaced islands further ‘north’ than those suggested in Cardigan Bay. Anglesey and Mann are quite clearly indicated, along with their towns and castles. Chester and the nascent city of Liverpool are discernible as are their respective rivers, but two smaller islands are also indicated in Liverpool Bay. So what are these? Perhaps one represents the Wirral peninsula, then considered an island, the other perhaps a lost ‘sandbank’ in Liverpool Bay where the submerged forests lie? This would be the shallow seabed upon which the wind farms have now been erected. Again however, the expert reading of the faint text is that the larger island represents Priestholm, off Anglesey, while the smaller depicts Hilbre Island in the Dee estuary. The River Mersey was never mentioned by the Romans and is not shown on Ptolemy’s second-century map of Britain – but is it clearly shown on the Gough Map. The Romans preferred to establish their port on the River Dee at Chester; and it may be observed how the former waterfronts at Neston and Heswall have silted-up since Medieval times. It is likely that in Roman times the River Mersey was not yet the wide and navigable estuary that we see today, but a less prominent stream that meandered through the marshes and forest deposits into Liverpool Bay; the modern channel is a post-Glacial diversion from its ancient course into the Dee estuary. [30] So, why should we doubt that soft flatlands along the Irish Sea coast have been eroded over the past few-thousand years, or of deposition along other parts of the same coast? We may observe these coastal processes ongoing today and many are recorded in historical times. At Harlech, for example, the castle now lies well inland, whereas the sea formerly lapped right up to the walls. The site was chosen so that the fortress could be resupplied by boat in times of siege. Submerged forests occur all around the Welsh coasts, of which the earliest reference was by Gerald of Wales in 1191, who remarked that the forests exposed by storms on Newgale Beach must be a relic of the Biblical Deluge. (Book 1 Ch. 13) [31] He recorded that recent winter storms had revealed similar black peat deposits “in many west-coast ports”. St Brides Bay is said to be the site of another legendary lost land: the Kingdom of Teithi Hen. Elsewhere around the modern British seacoast we may observe the inexorable erosion and silting processes. Along the east coast of England, from Yorkshire down to Suffolk, several miles of coast have been lost to the sea. Land is eroded from the soft cliffs by every winter storm despite attempts to protect the coast. For example, in 1993 a hotel near Scarborough fell into the sea on live television. The eroded coastal sediments are carried further south where they have created long beaches around the Humber estuary and the Lincolnshire resorts around Skegness. The town of Dunwich on the Suffolk coast is clearly marked on the Gough map but has long since given way to the sea. In Roman times the coast lay some 2 km further east. The town began to erode in the thirteenth century after winter storms, with the church finally falling away in 1912. The lost town is infamous as a ‘rotten borough’, which continued to send two MPs to parliament until the 1832 Reform Act despite having only two remaining voters. On the south coast of England, historian William Pullen makes a strong case from historical evidence that the harbour where the Atrebates landed in Britain has been submerged since the Iron Age. [32] This incursion is mentioned in Caesar’s commentaries. [IV,12 & 21] Pullen would argue that Cymenshore, the lost oppidum of the Atrebates, lay on the Mixon rocks south of Selsey Bill; the antiquarian William Camden in 1701 recorded that the remains of an “ancient little city” could be seen at low tide. The fate of Cymenshore and Dunwich are analogous to that of Cantre’r Gwaelod. If these historically-documented sites can so easily fall victim to the waves then it makes poor science to deny that tales of ancient lost lands on the Welsh coast could not be degraded memories of real events. To suggest that these legends, from diverse sources and cultures, are mere fantasy cannot explain why they show so much internal correspondence and consistency with physical evidence that ancient storytellers could not have known. Land Bridges to Ireland and the Isle of Man The limitations of the various sea-level and deglaciation models are that they commence from a uniformitarian base. The data only takes account of the extent and melting of ice, which itself must be estimated from assumptions about how much ice formerly existed and by how much the sea level has risen; together with warping of the sea-floor based on the additional weight of meltwater; this in turn sits atop best-calculations of how elastic the crust and mantle are believed to be. Although some models also consider geoid-eustasy due to polar wander altering the figure of the earth, they cannot take account of step-changes to the geoid, which might be due to non-glacial geophysical events deep in the mantle and core; or due to astronomical influences. Mathematical modelling cannot determine how much soft sediment may have been eroded from the glacial moraines by tides and strong currents; and by storm waves while they remained above the sea. We need only consider the relatively modest erosion evident around modern coasts to see how much the soft sedimentary landforms could have been sculpted over thousands of years. Locations of terminal moraines from the most recent (Devensian) ice sheet This is fig. 1 of Mitchell’s 1963 paper, which would still largely be accepted as a good summary of the maximum ice extent. [33] Of prime interest are the moraines between Inishowen, Islay and the Inner Hebrides, which marked the terminal moraines from the last glacial maximum at c.18000 BP. Note also the ridge in the Irish Sea between Bride and the Cumbrian coast. The depths are shown here in feet. These moraines mark the high points on the seabed and are therefore the most likely sites of the former ‘land bridges’ to Ireland and the Isle of Man. However, Mitchell (following the thenprevailing ‘eustatic’ theories) concluded that the ridge between Ireland and Scotland was too deep to have been exposed during the Holocene. He did not consider that the ridges might have been eroded from their original height. These conclusions persist in more recent deglaciation modelling. To take as just one example, the title of the 2008 paper by Edwards & Brooks: “The Island of Ireland: Drowning the Myth of an Irish Land Bridge” displays the confidence of the modellers. They admit that their model addresses only five of the eight criteria listed by Devoy (1995) regarding deglaciation and the origin of Irish flora and fauna. [34] Again, to quote their words: …two variables are of key importance: the rise of ocean levels caused by climate warming and the melting of land-based ice; and the vertical adjustment of the Earth’s surface due to the redistribution of this mass (i.e. unloading of formerly glaciated regions and loading of the ocean basins and their flooded margins). … These ‘glacial rebound models’ (GRM) can be thought of as comprising three principal elements: an ice loading model (which defines the changing global distribution of grounded ice thickness), an Earth model (which simulates the deformation of the solid Earth to surface loading) and an algorithm to compute associated changes in sea level. The list of assumptions and provisos constitutes several paragraphs of justification for their confidence in the model. They continue by summarising the models of various other contributors, such as Wingfield (1995) and Lambeck (2001) that have validated the application of similar deglaciation models. Lambeck’s model makes a better attempt to constrain the calculations by actual coastal evidence. [35] [ *see Note 3] The conclusions of Edwards & Brooks suggest that the link between Ireland and Wales was severed very early; and that the link to Scotland was lost between 18000 and 16000 BP along with the separation of the Scottish and Irish ice sheets; thus leaving only a brief period for animals to reach Ireland around the margins of the ice; again to quote from the study: By the time of this rapid rise in RSL the ice sheet connecting Ireland to Scotland had also wasted away, leaving Ireland completely isolated from Britain by water over 30 m in depth. By the opening of the Holocene (10 000 BP) water depths in excess of 50 m clearly separated Ireland from Britain and the rest of Europe. The proposed submergence is somewhat earlier than some other deglaciation models suggest; a similar model by Clarke et al (2010) would put the separation of the ice sheets between 17-16 ka BP suggesting that the loss of the physical land link was somewhat later. [36] The view of Devoy (1985) was that if a land bridge had ever existed, it could only have lain between the north of Ireland and Scotland as “a discontinuous linkage formed by temporary islands”. The date of this land bridge he estimated at 11400 to 10200 ± 200 BP. [37] However, this would still pre-date by thousands of years the final drowning of the North Sea land link between Britain and the continent. [ * see note 3] With so many divergent expert opinions just what are we to believe? Does the deglaciation modelling prove that no Holocene land-link to Ireland could have existed? Well, no! It may prove that they are excellent modellers of their chosen data, but it cannot prove what happened to the real sea in the real past. If assumptions about the extent of the former ice sheets or the global sea level rise are incorrect then it fails. If assumptions about the strength of the crust and mantle are questionable then again it fails. Modelling cannot explain why the Holocene climate transitions were abrupt rather than gradual. If there were other geological and astronomical factors, unrelated to melting ice, then again the modelling fails. The extent of thousands of years of erosion from the soft moraines and cliffs also cannot be modelled. More data from the seabed is needed, not more modelling! On this lack of data from offshore boreholes, Edwards & Craven (2017) would comment: ..great strides are being made in the provision of submerged material...Nevertheless, these data remain sparse, they are rarely collected with RSL reconstruction as a prime objective, and the recovery of sediment that unambiguously indicates a terrestrial environment is limited. [38] Finally, in concluding that the huge advance and regression of the coastline in the Irish Sea during the era of the submerged forests and footprints, as was accepted by the pioneer investigators, is not plausible then it is important to revisit the core concept of geoid-eustasy. This would suggest that a pattern of transgression and regression should correspond in opposite quadrants of the world; and the contrary phenomena should manifest in adjacent quadrants. During the same warm mid-Holocene era as the submerged forests and footprints, the coast of China receded by as much as 80 km and was rapidly colonised by rice farmers. [39] Some Chinese investigators dare to suggest that the ‘western’ models of submergence since the Ice Age need to be revised because they do not work for east Asia. If some event could cause a regression of the coast by 80 km in Asia then it follows that transgression of a similar scale is entirely feasible for the Irish Sea at the same era. The Irish Flora and Fauna We return to the thorny problem of how the plants and animals reached Ireland and the Isle of Man since the Ice Age. Perhaps the most telling criticism of all the deglaciation models remains that they still do not answer the fundamental question of how the plants and animals crossed the sea. Giraldus Cambrensis again, records in his History and Topography of Ireland (para 48) the medieval debate as to whether the Isle of Man belonged with Ireland or Britain. It was considered a part of Britain since it held poisonous snakes, whereas Ireland did not; an observation that remains a useful indicator to the distant past. During the Ice Age, when sea levels were at their lowest, Ireland was covered by the same ice-sheet as northern Britain and most of its unique Pleistocene fauna went extinct. Only species able to endure harsh tundra conditions could have survived, by taking refuge on parts of the continental shelf that are today drowned far to the south in the Celtic Sea. Possible survivors from this era are the Irish hare, pine martens, red squirrels, stoats and otters. There are no tunnelling moles or weasels in Ireland; and it seems unlikely that the amphibians and reptiles could have survived tundra conditions. [40] Invasive species could only have crossed as the ice receded by whatever land link may have existed in the north. Only 26 mammal species crossed, compared to some 100 for Britain. Grass snakes are rare north of the English Midlands; the adder, although scarce, is also found in Scotland but it never reached Ireland. The only reptile to make the crossing is the ‘common’ lizard, found also in mainland Scotland but not on the western islands. Only those hardy species that reached Scotland could have arrived in Ireland via a tenuous northern route. The roe deer and extinct aurochs, so prominent in the Formby footprints, never reached Ireland. According to DNA studies the Irish red deer are believed to be introduced, as also are the badgers. [41] [42] It may be significant that Ireland lacks the burrowing animals, suggestive that part of the land link was across waterlogged tidal sands. By contrast, southern England was never glaciated but only tundra animals could have survived there. Species could repopulate Britain from the continent as the climate ameliorated and some did reach the Isle of Man. Missing from the island’s fauna are squirrels, voles, badgers and foxes, but the amphibians and reptiles made the journey. There is no confirmation that wild aurochs ever reached the Isle of Man despite the presence of their footprints on the mainland at Formby. It may be seen that the faunal evidence for a land link is greatly complicated by the likelihood of introductions from Iberia by the earliest human colonists. We must await verification by further DNA studies; however such clues as we have would seem to rule-out a southern land-bridge between Ireland and Wales during the Holocene. Welsh and Irish Folklore While modelling and physical evidence may persuade specialists that there was no Holocene land link in the Irish Sea, the many myths and legends present a quite different picture. It would be too great a task here to do more than list with comment a few of the relevant stories. Scientists in general get away with ignoring them as fantasy unless they happen to support their conclusions. It is the consistent pattern across the stories that represents ‘evidence’ together with any relict geography that they include. Sometimes they may contain ‘fossil’ details and comments that can be extracted and compared to modern science. In oral preservation the particulars wander and the degree of variation is a good indicator of how old a legend may be. [* see Note 2] From the Irish side of the sea we have the many myths of the Irish Otherworld, the Land under the Wave, Tir fo Thuinn, also known by various other names such as Tir Na nÓg (the land of youth). It is described as a flowery plain beneath the Irish Sea as the hero Bran mac Febal sails above the lost land in his boat. It was guarded by Manannan mac Lir, the Irish god of the Sea, who is remembered in the name of the Isle of Man. Other stories describe the contented golden-haired folk who lived there. In the Irish Book of Invasions and from the origin stories of Nennius, the early colonists encounter a curious tower projecting from the sea, inhabited by strange people – evidently a part of the ‘Celtic’ Otherworld. They attempt to land near the tower but many perish and their ships are lost. From the Welsh side of the sea, we again encounter the tower in the sea as The Mound or Fairy Fortress in a cryptic Taliesin poem: The Spoils of Annwn featuring the Welsh hero Arthur. Three ships accompany Arthur on his expedition but only seven men escape drowning, thus revealing it as a palace with high towers partially submerged by the sea. Annwn appears as another description of the Otherworld; a submerged extension to the land area of Britain. The most intriguing of the Irish legends is that of the Giants Causeway. The extant volcanic columns of the Giant’s Causeway in Co. Antrim marked the start of a road built by the giants between Ireland and Scotland, where similar formations occur on the Isle of Staffa. Try to look beyond how the myth has become shrouded in giant lore. It is significant that the memory of a causeway between Ireland and Scotland is evoked here in the only place where the seabed is shallow enough for a tenuous landbridge ever to have existed. How could the Irish bards have known about the submerged moraine on the sea floor? In the Welsh Mabinogi of Branwen, Daughter of Llyr we hear of the ‘giant’ Bran who is able to stride across the sea to Ireland. The story recalls that in order to cross from Britain to Ireland he had but to cross two rivers named Lli and Archan. The myth further records (Gantz translation) that later “the sea widened and overflowed the kingdoms”. [43] [ * See Note 3] Translation difficulties apart, we may conjecture that the later bards concluded that only a giant could have waded across the sea. This would seem to be another echo of the Irish Giant’s Causeway legend. In the curious Dream of Maxen we have what appears to be a memory of the eastern Irish Sea as it may have looked in some earlier time, viewed from summit of Snowdon (yr Wyddfa). Maxen’s dream describes a plain as large as the sea with broad rivers flowing across it; and again the palace with towers. How could the bards have known about the submerged river channels on the sea floor? Other timeless legends describe cities and kingdoms submerged around the Welsh coast. In addition to the Cantre’r Gwaelod story we have the lost kingdoms of Teithi Hen and Rhedfoe; and we may add comparable legends from Cornwall and Brittany. If we look beyond how the details have wandered in oral preservation we may note the underlying congruence of archaic geography. All the legends are taking place in a warm, temperate, one might say idyllic climate. There is never any mention of ice or tundra; although the Irish invasion legends describe ‘lake bursts’ as if the land were still rebounding from the primeval ice burden. The Irish legends about Manannan are set in the vicinity of the Isle of Man, which is the only location where the sea is shallow enough for a flat plain to have been exposed. How could the ancient bards have known that this was the correct place to ‘invent’ these curious tales? One would expect Irish storytellers to create a fictional Otherworld off Irish shores not British. Also, we have no myths (except perhaps that of Merlin’s prophecy) that might recall the lost Doggerland in the North Sea. This would suggest that the Boreal submergence is too old to be remembered and that the folklore evokes the warm Neolithic era. So what might we expect to be preserved as submerged archaeology after thousands of years? Sadly the most likely answer is: ‘not much’. The legend of the Giant’s Causeway suggests only a narrow spit of land, perhaps resembling modern Chesil Beach or Spurn Head, that was exposed for several hundred years on the moraine between Inishowen and Islay during a warm temperate period; and that a few hardy species were able to cross it from Britain, via Scotland. It may have comprised a chain of low islands, separated by tidal beaches, as was suggested by Devoy. We may even contemplate that, as the soft moraine was breached, the ancient people tried in vain to save it by building a sea wall and a causeway. On the British side of the Irish Sea it is likely that the temporary covering of sediment carried down by the rivers has been scoured back to glacial bedrock by the notoriously strong currents between Anglesey and Mann. Nothing may remain to show how it looked during the ‘submerged forest period’. However, closer to the Lancashire and Cumbria coasts, where we find the fossil footprints, the deep mud belt may hide more submerged forests and human activity from the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. We should expect any finds to be similar to those that survive around modern coasts. The blunt analysis must be that if the sea level science and deglaciation models are valid then none of the legends of submerged lands in the Irish Sea can be true. Celtic scholars would then have to explain why there is so much agreement between them. To the contrary, if specialists determine to ignore the folklore then they must disprove all of it. Even one footprint or anomalous artefact discovered offshore would invalidate all the sea level models. Conclusions We may see that when sea level and deglaciation models for Britain and Ireland are compared with evidence from other parts of the world there is an ambiguity in the science. We also see that the current modelling cannot explain the spread of animals to Ireland and it completely ignores the evidence of ancient human eyewitnesses as recorded in oral tradition. It also does not explain how the climate could transition so rapidly from periods of tundra to boreal and then to warm temperate conditions. A valid reconstruction of the past must reconcile all these diverse sources of evidence, rather than allowing incompatible views to co-exist within each narrow academic discipline. The older concept of a ‘submerged forest period’ during the mid-Holocene offers a much better fit to the cross-disciplinary evidence. It would concur that the Irish Sea land bridge was indeed severed at the end of the Ice Age, as the deglaciation models suggest, but that it re-emerged for perhaps 1-2k years to close the North Channel during the warm mid-Holocene climate. This older science would better explain how the temperate fauna (but not the burrowing creatures) could reach Ireland and how the oak-birch forests were able to grow up on the emergent Welsh and Lancashire coast. Such is the academic fear of professional ridicule that it took a century from the first proposal of the North Sea Doggerland link before archaeologists dared to seriously discuss the likelihood of human occupation on the now-submerged land. [44] A temporary period of lowered relative sea level in the Irish Sea would coincide with the British-Irish Mesolithic through to mid-Neolithic; and so it also raises the prospect of submerged offshore archaeology in the Irish Sea. The reason why archaeologists have not looked is because the geology and sea-level science (since the 1960s) has decreed that there would be nothing for them to find. NOTES Note 1: Preservation of Submerged Forest Deposits The consensus would be that submerged forests could not have been gradually submerged by the sea. Rather, they must result from a rapid, perhaps catastrophic, entombment of the trees beneath protective beach sand after their roots were drowned by the sea; otherwise they should have decayed long ago through normal biological processes. We must consider a mechanism that first inundated the woodlands with sea water and then, sometime later, a storm event knocked down the ailing trees and covered the stumps and fallen trunks with the preserving layer of sand. Furthermore the tide did not return to erode the forest deposits! The published carbon-14 dates may come from anytime during the lifetime of the tree. As for dating the events, even if the sample were taken from the final growth-ring it would only indicate the date of the tree’s death; it would not tell us how many years the living roots were immersed or the date when the later event knocked over the dead trees. We are not looking at just a single storm or tsunami, but a sequence of events over a period of years. Note 2: ‘Celtic’ Mythology I have not included here references to all of the diverse myths, which can be further explored in the suggested links. Oral legends are by their very nature ‘unscientific’. To repeat: their potential as evidence lies in the consistent pattern across the stories. Since the concept of a single Celtic race has been invalidated by DNA it is no longer acceptable to describe the Irish and Welsh tales collectively as ‘Celtic Myths’ that entered the islands along with invading continental Celts. Rather, they represent native British and Irish folklore that has been preserved orally via the Celtic languages. Any congruence between them arises from independent Welsh and Irish memories of the same ancient geography. Note 3: Myths and Legends as Evidence? The deep divide between arts and sciences within academic study discourages any discussion of myths and legends within a scientific paper, even should the scientist be aware of them. There is a risk that conservative academic referees would stifle such a paper from achieving publication. We must add to this the vagaries of preservation and the complexities of translation. Welsh Scholars will admit how difficult it is to render the cryptic verse of Taliesin into modern Welsh, let alone into English! There have been a number of attempts to translate the relevant passages in the story of Branwen. The translation of the Mabinogi by Guest (in the linked open-source text) shows that she could not understand what was intended. The version by Jones & Jones translates that the sea later widened to submerge entire kingdoms and also adds “in those days the deep water was not wide”; [45] this interpretation is echoed with less clarity in the Gantz translation. The view of geophysicist Kurt Lambeck [see ref 35] is worthwhile to quote as it shows that some of the best scientists are at least aware of the mythological sources even if they only mention them in a flippant manner: The predicted land bridge occurs at about 51° north latitude and 7° west longitude... For all models considered, the predicted land bridge is only a few metres above coeval sea-level and is likely to have been flooded by the melt waters from the northern ice. Thus, although it could indeed have been crossed by wading by Bendigeidfran ‘with all that there was of string minstrels(y) on his own back’, it may not have provided an effective or friendly route for other faunal and floral migrations from Britain (and Europe) to Ireland. Lambeck was of course considering here a modelled land bridge in the Celtic Sea c.16000 BP during the Ice Age. One must doubt that Welsh mythology remembers quite that far back! The true value for potential archaeology lies in the setting of all these tales in a warm era of lowered sea levels; a view that would be consistent with modern (1950s) science if not with more recent mathematical modelling. ***************************************************** Relevant Hyperlinks Internet sources, which may subsequently be lost should also be cited for their contribution to research. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01856-2 https://spirallingleaf.wordpress.com/2016/10/12/footprints-and-the-ephemeral-stone-circle-of-formby-point/ https://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/151/590x/secondary/human-footprints4306469.webp?r=1664276452804 https://www.academia.edu/10389858/Looking_for_lost_lands_submerged_forests_in_the_UK http://oldwirral.net/meols_forrest.html https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Submerged_Forests/Chapter_5 https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/node/1614 https://historicengland.org.uk/research/current/heritage-science/intertidal-peat-database/ https://www.third-millennium.co.uk/the-irish-sea-coast https://www.academia.edu/92762932/When_the_Sky_Leaned_over_in_Ancient_China_ https://www.third-millennium.co.uk/patterns-on-the-irish-sea-floor https://www.academia.edu/85268409/An_Atlantis_Miscellany https://www.irishtimes.com/news/was-there-a-land-bridge-across-the-irish-sea-1.1159193 https://www.irishcentral.com/news/were-ireland-and-britain-once-joined-by-a-land-bridge-123954134-237393861 https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/ag/article/view/32596 https://www.swansea.ac.uk/press-office/news-events/news/2022/09/lost-islands-cited-in-welsh-folklore-and-poetry-areplausible-new-study-of-coastal-geography-and-a-medieval-map-suggests.php https://www.jesus.ox.ac.uk/the-lost-islands-of-cardigan-bay/ https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/medieval-map-may-show-evidence-of-wales-atlantis/arAA10U5bv?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=ENTPSP&cvid=2e7e68da09c74ded8ee932cf8f2dbbad https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-62605682 https://www.maproomblog.com/2022/09/the-gough-map-and-the-lost-islands-of-cardigan-bay/ https://www.dyfedarchaeology.org.uk/lostlandscapes/submergedforests.html https://coflein.gov.uk/en/site/524759/ http://cherishproject.eu/en/project-areas/welsh-project-areas/sarn-padrig-morfa-harlech/ https://www.discoverceredigion.wales/heritage-and-culture-to-explore/ceredigion-legends/lost-lands-cantrer-gwaelodand-the-celtic-otherworld/ https://www.frieze.com/article/cantrer-gwaelod-ancient-sunken-forest-unearthed-storm-hannah https://www.thescarboroughnews.co.uk/heritage-and-retro/retro/in-pictures-the-day-the-earth-moved-and-the-holbeckhall-hotel-in-scarborough-collapsed-into-the-sea-2876171 http://www.dunwich.org.uk/history/ https://www.academia.edu/83341204/Cymenshore_the_submerged_Atrebates_Oppidum_at_Selsey_Mixon_rocks http://www.wondersofbritain.org/wonder6/notes/llion.html https://www.irishnews.com/lifestyle/2017/03/11/news/take-on-nature-so-just-how-did-frogs-come-to-be-in-ireland-955180/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7211870/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379112000856 https://www.harpercollins.ca/author/cr-180298/j-a-steers/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/gj.3350110204 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249182043_Eustasy_and_Geoid_Changes https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/glacial-adjustment.html https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341453844_Exploration_of_submerged_Mesolithic_landscapes_around_the_B rown_Bank_southern_North_Sea https://presentations.copernicus.org/EGU2020/EGU2020-19139_presentation.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~meehan/flood/sealevel.html https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379110002817 https://www.academia.edu/85268409/An_Atlantis_Miscellany https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5160/5160-h/5160-h.htm#chap08 REFERENCES 1. 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(1974) The Mabinogion, J.M. Dent & sons Ltd, London Other References Devoy, Robert J. N. (1995) Deglaciation, Earth crustal behaviour and sea-level changes in the determination of insularity: a perspective from Ireland, Geological Society, London, Special Publications, Vol. 96, pp 181 – 208 https://doi.org/10.1144/GSL.SP.1995.096.01.14 Matthews, J. (1930) The Origin of the Irish Fauna and Flora. Nature 126, 297 https://doi.org/10.1038/126297a0 Tooley, M. (2007). Flandrian sea-level changes in West Lancashire and their implications for the ‘Hillhouse Coastline’. Geological Journal. 11. 137 - 152. 10.1002/gj.3350110204. Tags: submerged forests, raised beaches, sea level changes, glaciology, pole shift, Irish land-bridge, fossil footprints, Cantre’r Gwaelod, Irish myths, Welsh myths, Celtic myths, Irish flora & fauna, deglaciation models, Ice Age, Atlantis, Mabinogion Citation: Dunbavin, Paul (2023) Footprints from Atlantis (Sea Levels & Submerged Forests), pp 57-92, in Prehistory Papers III, Third Millennium Publishing, ISBN: 978-0-9525029-6-8 https://www.academia.edu/95341518/Footprints_from_Atlantis_Sea_Levels_and_Submerged_Forests © Copyright Paul Dunbavin and Third Millennium Publishing (2023) www.third-millennium.co.uk