The View over Atlantis

[steepholm]

Like anyone who truly loves life (I presume), I spend exorbitant amounts of time thinking about my own demise and that of everyone I love. I suppose there are worse fates than becoming part of a mythical race of people who were once said to live in the Drowned Archipelago, but I can't feel altogether easy at the disappearance of every town and city I've ever lived in. Romsey, Englefield Green, York, Cambridge, Bristol... all pass into legend, or are more likely sunk in oblivion.

Perhaps we'll be rediscovered in due course. Bristol can be the new Doggerland. Up from the millennial slime a broken tower will stand revealed by some future tide, or a pedestrian crossing unsilt itself, like Borth's new wattle walkway. Perhaps the sea will fall away again, and we'll be discovered by rabbits, weed-wound iPhones in our bony fingers.

It's not such a bad way to go, and I'd rather the curse fell on this generation than on some future cohort of our guiltless children. But I do regret the loss of the line at Dawlish, that lovely stretch of Devonian littoral, passage along which (in a chariot drawn by herring gulls) was once our bucket-and-spade portal into Cornwall.

"Logres is before you," Merriman tells Barney when he and the other Drews disembark at St Austell in Over Sea, Under Stone. Perhaps, now, he would say Lyonesse.

Comments

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

I cut quite a lot. He envisages a navigable passage through the Vale of White Horse, or part of it:

'The Lake is also divided into two unequal portions by the straits of White Horse, where vessels are often weather-bound, and cannot make way against the wind, which sets a current through the narrow channel.'

I don't know whether that is plausible. Geography is not my strongest point.

Here is a link to the full description.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I love the idea that the Thames "had become partially choked by the cloacae of the ancient city"!