Case file · Folklore / legend
Lyonesse, the lost land of Cornwall
Legend says the kingdom of Lyonesse stretched from Land's End to the Isles of Scilly, with fair towns and some 140 churches, until the sea swallowed it in a single night.
1500 CE · 50.00, -5.95 · status: legend
The account
In Arthurian romance it is the homeland of Tristan, son of King Meliodas. Cornish tradition says one man, Trevelyan, escaped on a white horse that lost a shoe as he fled, and the Vyvyan family keeps a white horse in its crest as his descendants. Fishermen have told of glass and wood in their nets. A 2009–2013 'Lyonesse Project' commissioned by English Heritage reconstructed how rising seas actually split Scilly into islands.
The sceptical view
There was no kingdom; real drowned land around Scilly, flooded slowly after the Ice Age, probably fed the tale.
Connections in the atlas
- The drowned city of Ys
- Dunwich and the bells beneath the sea
- Manannán mac Lir and his cloak of mist
- Doggerland, the land under the North Sea
- Cantre'r Gwaelod, the drowned hundred