Cantre’r Gwaelod

At low tide on the beach at Borth the sand draws back and a forest comes up out of it. Black stumps of oak and pine stand in the peat, soft enough to take a thumbnail, and the flat runs north toward the Dyfi estuary smelling of salt and slow rot. Edward Lhuyd walked this shore in 1695 and wrote that the roots and stumps he saw between Borth and Aberdovey appeared more like cole-black peat than timber. Storms uncover more of them every few winters. Somewhere out past them, according to a story the Welsh have been telling for at least eight hundred years, there is a kingdom.

The version most people meet goes like this. Cantre’r Gwaelod was a hundred of low, fat farmland lying west of the present coast, between Bardsey Island in the north and Ramsey Island in the south, so rich that an acre of it was reckoned worth four anywhere else. Because it sat below the tide it was walled off by an embankment, and the embankment had gates that were opened at low water to let the land drain and shut again before the sea came back. Its capital was Caer Wyddno, seat of Gwyddno Garanhir. The man responsible for the gates was Seithennin. One night there was a feast, Seithennin drank too much mead, the gates stayed open, and by morning sixteen towns and every field between them were under water. Those who got out ran for the high ground of Ardudwy and Eryri.

That story is late. It hardens into its familiar shape only from the seventeenth century onward, and the oldest witness has almost none of it in it. In the Black Book of Carmarthen, a manuscript written no later than about 1250 and the earliest book we have wholly in Welsh, there is a short poem of eight stanzas that never mentions a gate, a sluice, mead or a feast day. It opens with a command: stand forth, Seithennin, and look at the fury of the sea, for it has covered the plain of Gwyddno. He is not the culprit there. He is the man told to go outside and see what has happened.

The blame in the poem falls on a woman, and nobody has ever quite settled who she was. Two stanzas curse a maiden who let something loose after a feast, or after a battle, and identify her by an office at a fountain. W. F. Skene, translating in 1868, made her a damsel who let loose the Fountain of Venus. Rachel Bromwich, whose 1950 study remains the standard treatment, made her the fountain cup-bearer of the raging sea, which turns a mythic personification into a job at a well. In the fuller Welsh tradition she has a name, Mererid, which Bromwich simply renders as Margaret. Later Welsh retellings make her a daughter of the king who kept the wells and let them overflow in anger at her situation. The poem itself says nothing about her motives. It only curses her, twice, in almost the same words.

Picture the work she was supposed to be doing. A covered spring inside the ramparts, a stone lip worn smooth, a cup on a chain, and someone whose whole duty is to keep the lid on it and the water at the level it has always been. It is the least dramatic office in any kingdom until the single night it isn’t.

Then the poem does the thing that makes it worth reading. It stops narrating and starts listening. Four stanzas turn on a cry coming off the water, over the rampart, up out of the fortress, and the cry is hers. The cry of Margaret from the battlements today, even to God is uttered. Each stanza closes with the same flat proverb, that what usually follows presumption is utter loss. Then the last three lines put Seithennin in the ground, between Caer Cenedir and the shore of the great sea, and give him an epithet the later tradition would take entirely the wrong way: the weak-minded.

The drunkard came afterwards, and he came from a forgery. Seithennin’s reputation rests on a triad naming him one of the Three Disgraceful Drunkards of the Isle of Britain, son of Seithyn Saidi, who in his drink let the sea over the hundred of Gwaelod. That triad belongs to the Third Series printed in the Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales between 1801 and 1807, and the Third Series is the work of Iolo Morganwg, who fabricated it and passed it off as medieval. Thomas Love Peacock found the triads in translation in the journal The Cambro-Briton and built The Misfortunes of Elphin around them in 1829, where Seithenyn becomes a magnificent comic sot defending the rotten embankment on the grounds that its holes let the wind through. The novel is a delight. It is also the reason a man the thirteenth century called weak-minded is now remembered as a drunk.

Bromwich went further and questioned the address. There is no certainty, she argued, that twelfth-century tradition put Maes Gwyddno in Cardigan Bay at all, since Gwyddno Garanhir belongs by descent to the Old North rather than to Wales. She read Cantre’r Gwaelod and the drowned court of Llys Helig in the Conwy estuary as one story localised twice around two legendary sixth-century figures, with Ker-Is in Brittany as the same tale again across the water. The bells and the ruins visible at the equinoctial tides are, she noticed, exactly what both Welsh versions share.

What the bay actually offers is stranger than a dyke. Three long ridges of clay, gravel and boulders run out from the shore at right angles to it, exposed for miles at low water: Sarn Badrig between Harlech and Barmouth, Sarn Bwch near Aberdyfi, and Sarn Cynfelyn near Aberystwyth, which is the one said to end at Caer Wyddno. They are moraines, dumped by melting glacial ice, and they look uncannily like the footings of walls. The submerged forest at Borth and Ynyslas grew on peat between roughly six thousand and four and a half thousand years ago. Under the stumps the peat holds burnt stone from hearths, a near-complete aurochs skeleton found in the late 1960s, a set of red deer antlers, and footprints: boar, deer, and human feet from children to adults, pointing every way at once, as though a crowd had stood milling about a watering place rather than fleeing anything.

The sea took it slowly. Cores drilled off Aberaeron record a peat dated to 8740 years before the present and then an unhurried slide from marsh to estuarine mudflat to open water, with no catastrophe in the sediment anywhere. At Borth the top of the peat alternates between clay and organic layers, which is what gradual or stop-start flooding looks like. There was no one night. If a memory survives here at all, it is the memory of a coastline that kept moving in a direction nobody could argue with, and possibly of something more recent: a thirteenth-century map in the Bodleian Library, the Gough Map, shows two islands standing offshore in Cardigan Bay, and Simon Haslett and David Willis have modelled their erosion down to nothing by the sixteenth century.

What the drowned hundred still does, it does through sound. On a quiet day at Aberdyfi the church bells of Cantre’r Gwaelod are said to be audible under the water, ringing of their own accord, and they are held to ring loudest when danger is coming. That is the one power the place has kept, and it is a warning rather than a gift. Nobody in any version reaches the kingdom, bargains with it, or comes back from it with anything. The limit is absolute: the land is not an otherworld with a door, it is simply gone, and the only things it returns are stumps, bones and prints, handed up by the tide a few at a time and taken back by the next storm. Borth’s older full name is Porth Wyddno yng Ngheredigion, the harbour of Gwyddno in Ceredigion, which is either the last surviving address of a lost kingdom or the reason the story ended up here in the first place.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Cantre’r Gwaelod?

Cantre’r Gwaelod, “the Lowland Hundred”, is a legendary Welsh kingdom said to have stood on fertile low ground in what is now Cardigan Bay, off the west coast of Wales. In the popular version it was protected from the sea by an embankment and sluice gates and was drowned in a single night when the gates were left open. Its capital was Caer Wyddno and its king was Gwyddno Garanhir.

Who caused the flooding of Cantre’r Gwaelod?

It depends which version you read, and the two blame different people. The oldest surviving account, a poem in the thirteenth-century Black Book of Carmarthen, curses a maiden connected with a fountain or well, named in Welsh tradition as Mererid. The familiar story in which the drunken Seithennin leaves the sluice gates open is much later, and his reputation as a drunkard comes from a triad fabricated by Iolo Morganwg around 1800.

Where was Cantre’r Gwaelod supposed to be?

Accounts place it in Cardigan Bay, on ground stretching west of the modern Welsh coast between Bardsey Island and Ramsey Island. The scholar Rachel Bromwich questioned this, pointing out that Gwyddno Garanhir belongs to the traditions of the Old North rather than to Wales, and arguing that the story was localised in Cardigan Bay and again in the Conwy estuary as the tale of Llys Helig.

Is there any real evidence for a drowned land in Cardigan Bay?

There is real drowned landscape, though not a drowned kingdom. The submerged forest at Borth and Ynyslas, with oak and pine stumps dated to between about 6000 and 4700 years ago, is exposed at low tide along with human and animal footprints, burnt hearth stones and animal remains preserved in peat. The three stone causeways known as the sarnau, which look like man-made embankments, are glacial moraines.

Can you really hear the bells of Cantre’r Gwaelod?

The bells are a fixed part of the legend rather than a documented phenomenon. On a quiet day at Aberdyfi the church bells of the drowned hundred are said to sound beneath the water, and tradition holds that they ring most clearly when danger is approaching. The same detail attaches to Llys Helig in north Wales, which is one of the reasons the two stories are thought to share an origin.

Related Entries

Taliesin, Bendigeidfran, Branwen, Afanc, Ceffyl Dwr, Arawn, Cŵn Annwn, Gwyn ap Nudd, Rhiannon, Pwyll, Coraniaid, Rhitta Gawr, Red Dragon (Y Ddraig Goch), Morgens, Tylwyth Teg