Colour photo by Garlinda Birkbeck
We have been staying in a huge house at the bottom of a deep glen inside Skye. The sea comes right along the bottom of the glen. The hills rise on either side, a thousand metres, steep, sometimes vertical. The water is black, and very, very deep. Red deer stand on sunlit patches of green grass, and whales – minke and pilot, mostly – surge and roll in the dark Sound of Sleat. Overhead, eagles fly: golden on the land, and over the sea huge white-tailed sea eagles, known as flying doors because of their vast wings, that seem to blot out the sun.

It is a place where humans hardly seem to belong. But there are traces of them everywhere – house foundations in the bracken and heather, standing stones on the crags, and high in the hills, clouded by midges, the remains of places where people and animals shared houses. In winter, the snow lies deep. In summer, the place is thick with ghosts.

We live in an ancient house. As with all really old houses, bits have been added to it over the years. Most of it dates from the time of the Tudors, who five hundred years ago swept in from Wales to take the throne of England. Parts of it are earlier – a long hall made of huge oak timbers infilled with a latticework of sticks, plastered with clay. You can still see the place where the smoke used to go out of a hole in the roof, before the invention of the chimney. And parts of it, lost now under the building of centuries, may date from times before history began.

On the morning of Midsummer’s Day I woke early to watch the sun rise. As the blood-red orb was still touching the horizon, it shone straight in at the front door, which is at the eastern end of a passage that runs from one side of the house to the other. Straight in at the door it shone, slam bang central, as it does on no other day of the year. It has this in common with (for instance) the alignment between the Heelstone and the Altar Stone at Stonehenge, and of course the alignments of the Lightsolstice Quoit in drowned Lyonesse, and the Powerfields of Carnac in Ar Mor, now sunk beneath the Bay of Douarnenez in Brittany.

Out to the west of the world and the island of Skomer off the Welsh coast, last stop before New York. In the bay called South Haven, the water is clear as green glass. My boat hangs from its anchor, alone in a great stone amphitheatre. The nearest human is ten miles away. In the air, hundreds of thousands of puffins and guillemots shout and creak and holler. In the sea, shoals of little fish hang suspended, flying themselves.

The night comes down. The moon comes up, wobbling in the slop of the water, and rides high among shooting stars. At two o’clock in the morning I wake in the stuffy cabin. The world is full of noise, as full as a football stadium, but a football stadium of ghosts, hooting and wailing. My hair stands on end. Then I see a shadow whip wing-down across the sea, trailing a long, eldritch howl. Another follows, and another. These are the Manx shearwaters back from fishing, bringing breakfast to their babies in the rabbit-hole nests high on the cliffs.

It is time to put the kettle on, and have a bit of breakfast ourselves.

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Found this fine picture. The end. Or is it the beginning? For more like it, go to http://ofearna.us/art/harrison.htm

Midsummer is coming. I was walking in the mountains yesterday, along a path of green turf that puts one of the walker’s feet in England and the other in Wales. Larks hung high in the blue, and the sun hammered down. It is nearly the Summer Solstice, Lightsolstice, as it is known in Lyonesse. The standing stones stood in little pools of their own shadow. In winter, the shadows are long black stripes on the frosty ground. It brought to mind this passage, recorded in the stone inscriptions known as the Mistle, found under a stone circle in Anglesey, last home of the Druids. Mistle is thought to be a set of instructions for young Druids. See what you think:

“The bull sacrifice has changed, too. The black bull has always been a symbol of night and darkness. In earlier times, before the wickedness of monsters, it was fought by a youth in a white robe, symbolising the sun, and taken away afterwards to continue its career on a nearby farm. But after the rise of the Captains, the bull was strapped to a Burner, and both suffered an agonizing death, to the delight of the cruel Regent Fisheagle and her cronies.”

A monster is yanked from the Wellworld – illustration by Patrice Aggs

When historians write about Lyonesse, they are inclined to concentrate on the exotic monstrosities that rise from the land’s bottomless Wells. The original animals of the Land were curious in their own way. Their descendants can be seen in the cave paintings of Lascaux and Les Eyzies, in France.

Predators
Direwolves,similar to the modern wolf, but the size of a moderate ox.
Longtooth cats, later vulgarized under the name of sabretooth tigers. These were about the size of a modern domestic cat, but had enormous teeth, designed for rending.
Foxes and badgers – similar to those found in Europe now, but bigger. The foxes were rather stupider than our modern foxes. The badgers, however, grew to enormous size and had the power of transmitting thought. In some corners of the kingdom, this enabled them to run informal parliaments of animals, able to call temporary truces in which (for instance) foxes and meece could live side by side without eating or being eaten.

Domestic animals
None of the wild animals could be trained. Among the tameable animals here were dogs, bred for obedience from carefully selected direwolves, and stints, small weasel-like creatures kept in houses to control pests like meece and rainbees. Animals were kept so they could be useful to humans and each other. The principal beast of burden was the aurochs, which was like a modern cow, with one important difference: Alph Hakestall, the loftiest man ever seen, could walk under an aurochs’ belly without ducking his head. Aurochs were milked, and drew heavy carts. There were also sheep and ponies, which did the things sheep and ponies have done since time began.

Others
A curiosity was the ancient Lyonesse tradition of sealherding. The Sealherds were a tribe that specialised in travelling the rookeries of the Outer Banks when the grey seals came ashore to have their babies. They milked the mother seals, only a little, so as not to deprive their babies, and saved the milk, which they made into cheese, heavy, pungent, golden.

Finally, there were small animals – meece, raa, frits. Meece were like mice. Raa were bigger, with orange teeth like chisels, and were a major pest, ravaging and destroying granaries. It was often said that the only useful thing the monsters did was to eat the raa. No monster ever ate a frit. The frits smelled too bad even for monsters. They lived in colonies known as frit tumps. Nobody went near them, so little is known about them.

The historical Lyonesse was forty parishes of green and hollow land, burrowed with caves, seamed with rivers, studded with towers, lying between what is now Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, which are now the Sundeeps. At its south, it was a mere five leagues from Ys of Ar Mor, which is to say the capital city of what is now called Brittany. Its existence is an accepted fact (though to be fair, many scientists deny this). When is a different matter. It is thought that it may have been between forty-five thousand and a hundred and ten thousand years ago.

The deniers, and they are many, complain that Lyonesse left no traces. True. But scientists also tell us that there could easily have been a civilisation during the last days of the dinosaurs, with cars, and planes, and great cities, and dentists. Since then, the continents have moved, and parts of the earth have slid under other parts, and mountains have risen, and seas have flowed where once there was land, and land has shrugged out of the sea. So the only way of telling whether the dinosaur has ever existed would be if you found a dinosaur fossil with fillings in its teeth.

The sign of old Lyonesse is the Devouring Eel: a creature that continuously eats itself, and continuously nourishes itself. Since its origins in Lyonesse, the Eel has become one of the most powerful symbols in magic all over the world.

from The True History of Lyonesse by Wylbaes Monckton, 1954