The Lost Land of Lyonesse, or Lethowsow - Part 4

The Scillonian ferry regularly crosses the waters above the legendary Lyonesse.  If you wish to use my photo please attribute this blog!

[cont.] "...and, to increase the wonder, a gentleman, accidentally on horseback, is carried by this animal to the neighbouring shore of Whitsand Bay, or twenty miles further off, to Perranuthnoe, through a sea which had swallowed an entire country, and from which the largest of modern vessels could not possibly have escaped. This idle tale, related by one writer after another, has almost reached our own times. The editor remembers a female relation of a former vicar of St Erth who, instructed by a dream, prepared decoctions of various herbs, and, repairing to the Land's End, poured them into the sea, with certain incantations, expecting to see the Lionesse country rise immediately out of the water, having all its inhabitants alive, notwithstanding their long submersion. But

'Perchance some form was unobserved,
Perchance in prayer or faith she swerved.'

No country appeared, and although the love of marvellous events, and of tales exciting the passions, seems not to have diminished in recent times, yet the editor is unaware of any subsequent attempt having been made to rescue those unfortunate people from their protracted state of suspended animation."--The Parochial History of Cornwall, by. Davies Gilbert, vol. iii.pp. 109, 110.

"Although a sweep of ocean, twenty-seven miles in breadth, separates at present the Land's End from the Scilly Islands, there can yet be little doubt of their having been heretofore united to each other by the mainland. The records of history indeed do not rise so high as the era when this disjunction was first effected; but we have documents yet remaining which prove to us that this strait must have been considerably widened, and the number of the Sciilly Islands greatly increased within the last sixteen or seventeen centuries, by the waters of the Atlantic (receding probably from the coast of America) pressing towards this coast of Britain, accumulating upon Bolerium, and overwhelming part of the western shores of Cornwall...." [cont.]

Hunt 1903











Map - Perranuthnoe

Map - Land's End

Map - Isles of Scilly
Map - Whitesand's Bay
Map - Bolerium