Page 15 - ModernParadiseFLIPBOOKcomplete

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“It might not be too fanciful to suggest that the many traditional stories of inundation

told in the early medieval period derive from very ancient memories passed from one
generation to the next – legends that would remind communities of the of the fickle
behaviour of the ocean and of the liminal nature of the interface between land and
sea. In this way they will have built up a cognitive geography of their landscapes.”

“For those used to exploiting territories in the southern North Sea region, the
eventual separation of Britain from continental Europe, probably in the fifth
millennium BC, may have given some awareness of Britain’s growing isolation but

little sense of its true island nature. When the concept of island Britain first became
understood, we can only speculate. In the east it may only gradually come into
consciousness as the land between Essex and the Low Countries disappeared beneath
the sea, but in the west the sense of separation between Britain and the adjacent
continent was very real, especially for those attempting to make the sea journey.

Perhaps the different geographies led to different concepts of space. In the east the

land was the dominant feature; it was a place of marchlands, inlets and rivers that
could be navigated on foot or by boat following watercourses and coastlines. The
west was entirely different. It was a land of promontories confronting the ocean.
Movement over any distance meant taking to the sea and making journeys out of
sight of land. The movement of hunter-gatherer communities into Ireland can only
have been accomplished by taking long sea journeys across the dividing waters and
there is evidence to suggest that even longer voyages were occasionally made. While
the peoples of western Britain may not have conceived of their land as an island, they

will have been all too aware of the sea as a dominant reality. The experience of
different personal geographies led to very different perceptions of space and to
different attitudes to mobility.”

The earliest historical writers support this. Cunliffe quotes the Roman writer Tacitus:
“Nowhere does the sea hold such sway. It carries to and fro in its motion a mass of

tidal currents and in its ebb and flow does not stop at the coast but penetrates deep
inland.”

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Cunliffe says that by the 1 century BC, during historical times, Roman geographers
knew Britain was an island and probably got this knowledge from Pytheas, an
explorer from Marseilles who probably circumnavigated the offshore islands (and
may also have reached Iceland and Ireland) as part of his travels around 320 BC. His
account was repeated by later writers we’ll be looking at such as Gildas and Bede.