Lost islands cited in Welsh folklore and poetry are plausible, new study of coastal geography and a medieval map suggests
Historians conveniently refer to lost islands marked on historical maps as "
phantom islands". There are countless islands on old maps, especially from before 1500, for which there is no known equivalent in our present times. The Island of
Frisland is one of those lost islands.
Mainstream historians usually dismiss these maps as fantasy constructs of our ancestors, thus ridiculing them.
On Wikipedia, this arrogance reads like this: "The oldest phantom islands have their origins in ancient or Christian legends. Antilia, the Saint Brendan Islands or Hy Brasil were inscribed on nautical charts because cartographers and sailors believed that saints and bishops had built ideal empires in the Atlantic. If such land could not be found, it was assumed to be further west. That's why such phantoms appear on early modern maps."
Now researchers have taken on a specific case of a supposed phantom island and found out that the so-called "Welsh Atlantis" actually existed and the so-called "Gough map" was probably based on reality. This map appeared only from the 18th century and newer researches show that it was probably made only in the 15th century. Thus, it can probably be assumed that the two disappeared islands off Wales existed about 500 years ago, probably even much longer.
The researchers suspect that the islands disappeared only in the 16th century:
"They suspect that the islands may be the remains of a low-lying landscape created by soft glacial deposits during the last ice age. Since then, erosional forces have eroded the land and reduced it to islands before they too were eroded and disappeared in the sixteenth century."
The "Welsh Atlantis" is said by legend to have been struck by a catastrophic flood and is mentioned in the poetry of the
Black Book of Carmarthen and in later folklore. As late as 1846, one author describes the ruins of these sunken islands:
"In the sea, about seven miles west of Aberystwyth in Cardiganshire, is a cluster of loose stones called Caer Wyddno, "the fortified palace of Gwyddno"; and near it are the remains of one of the southern roads or causeways of Catrev Gwaelod."
Even though the maps are mostly from the Middle Ages, they are often backdated to several thousand years ago. The last alleged ice age 10,000 years ago is often considered the authoritative event, and this is justified by arguing that these medieval maps refer to Ptolemy, who according to official chronology lived about 2,000 years ago. The contradiction that maps from 500-1000 years ago refer to a time about 1000-1500 years earlier is ignored. This would be similar to using a source from the 10th century A.D. for today's city maps for practical orientation - this is an absurd idea and lacks any basis.
Thus placing the many stories of floods in central Europe connected with the Biblical Flood myth far into the distant past is a tool of the history falsifiers and is maintained only by the arrogance to see in our ancestors naive idiots who did not understand their world. This is probably just the projection of a society that has lost any rooting in its own history and place in the world and has to resort to meaningless alienated narratives that take away our connection to both the past and the objective reality around us.
-
