Legends of Submerged Villages: Divine Punishment and Drowned Churches

If we think of submerged cities, lost beneath the waves, we’re probably most likely to think of Atlantis, that thought-experiment that took on a life of its own. Closer to home, there’s the lost Welsh kingdom of Cantre’r Gwaelod, believed to lie beneath the water between Bae Ceredigion and Ynys Enlli.

Yet there are countless tales of submerged villages along both the west and east coast of England too, not to mention villages lost to the depths of lakes or reservoirs.

Many of them share a preoccupation with drowned church bells continuing to toll beneath the water. Others tell stories of losses often assigned to divine retribution. So how do these villages appear in folklore? Let’s take a look!

A Village Punished by God

We’re off to Talkin Tarn in Cumbria, although not to explore the ghost story of a woman who apparently met her end in the lake at the hands of her lover. Instead, we’ll look at the legend of the sunken village, punished by God for its cruelty.

According to the story, a wealthy town stood where the lake is now (it’s 9 miles east of Carlisle). As you can imagine since wealthy towns rarely fare well in folklore, the town gained a reputation for being cruel and greedy. God dispatched an angel to try to sort them out, and he adopted a disguise as a beggar. He went door to door begging for food, and found himself turned away at every house. Onlookers threw stones at him when he tried begging for help in the marketplace. The angel decided to leave the town for a while and to rethink his strategy.

On his way out of the town, he met a poor widow. She invited him into her tumbledown cottage, and shared the little food she had. Her kindness touched the angel, but it also showed up the nastiness he’d experienced elsewhere. When he left her home, he asked God to punish the town and spare the widow.

Soon, a storm rolled in, battering the town with its fury. An earthquake tore open the ground and the town, with the exception of the widow’s house, sank into the pit. The next morning, the storm had passed, and a beautiful, 65-acre lake lay where the town once stood. People claimed you could see the town at the bottom of the lake if you rowed out to the middle on a calm day (Westwood 2005: 146).

The story is, as you might imagine, just that. In reality, Talkin Tarn was formed 10,000 years ago. Underground streams still feed it now, and it’s a glacial lake, not one created by biblical levels of punishment.

Other Versions

The idea of a city punished by God for its sins is also surprisingly common. The same origin story appears for Semer Water in Yorkshire. In this version, the traveller is either St Paul, Joseph of Arimathea, or Jesus. Only an elderly couple helped him, so when our intrepid traveller demanded the punishment of the village, he asked the couple be spared (Westwood 2005: 838).

It’s also a very old story motif, and one we even find in Greek mythology in the story of Baucis and Philemon. In this tale, Zeus and Hermes are the deities turned away by the townsfolk. Only the elderly couple show them any hospitality and Zeus and Hermes give them the chance to escape the town’s fate. The couple choose to ignore Zeus’ advice not to look back at the deluge and they’re transformed into an oak and a linden tree, their branches entwined forever.

Besides, the belief that a natural disaster was God’s punishment held fast for centuries. In 1703, Queen Anne ordered a national day of prayer after the ‘Great Gale’ to try and avoid further punishing storms (Westwood 2005: 382). What she’d make of the ones we’ve had in recent years is anybody’s guess.

The Village Drowned for Ingratitude

We now head to Urswick, on the Low Furness peninsula in Lancashire. According to legend, this is not the original village, after Old Urswick sank into a lake. Much as we find in the Talkin Tarn tale, this story explains the creation of the lake as much as it does the loss of the settlement.

In this story, the residents complained about the poor water supply and asked the vicar to resolve the issue. The vicar got them to form a procession to follow him around the church as he prayed. A stream sprang up in response to his prayers.

Iron in the soil made the water flow red, and the women complained again. How could they wash their clothes in such tainted water, they asked. They ordered him to pray again.

The vicar cautioned them against this. After all, God answered his prayer. Asking again seemed ungrateful, and he didn’t want to anger the Lord. He made a bargain with them; they should go home and consider his words for an hour. If they still thought he should try again, then they had to wave a white cloth from the window. An hour went by, and the vicar returned to the church. Around the church he went, praying for a clean water supply.

I’m sure he took no pleasure in being proven right. A water supply did appear, this time in the form of a flood that swallowed the village. Apparently, this explains why the waters of the lake in the area run reddish (Westwood 2005: 409).

A Lost Ancient City

The lake of Bomere in Shropshire boasts a legend in which an entire ancient city lies below the water. According to the story, the inhabitants refused to convert to Christianity. In some versions, they were Saxon, in others they were Roman. In other versions, the villagers turned their backs on Christianity and took up the worship of Woden and Thor. The priest warned them no good would come of their behaviour, but they persisted, with the exception of a small band who continued to worship God in the chapel. One December, which had been far wetter than usual, the priest was gathering wood on the hillside when he noticed a problem. A dam held back the nearby mere, but the water was beginning to overflow.

The priest ran down into the village, begging the men to cut a new channel to safely let the excess water out. The villagers refused as it was their winter festival, and they accused the priest of trying to spoil their fun. The priest gave up trying to help them and went to his chapel. Despite the rain, his flock gathered with him on Christmas Eve for their midnight mass. During the service, they heard an almighty roar. The mere breached the damn and a mighty flood flowed into the church before flooding the village. People continued to claim that if you travelled over the mere on Christmas Eve, you could hear the church bell tolling just after midnight (Burne 1883: 64-65).

If you miss that date, then you can head back on Easter Eve to see a Christian Roman rowing across the lake in desperation, trying to rescue his pagan sweetheart from the water (Westwood 2005: 614).

Singleton Thorpe

According to records, a horrible storm struck the north-west in September of either 1554 or 1555. A storm surge destroyed 12 villages between Carlisle and Southport, including three on the Fylde peninsula in Lancashire: Wadham Thorpe, Singleton Thorpe, and Kilgrimol. For fifty years after the disaster, people found coffins of decaying remains from Kilgrimol’s submerged churchyard on the beach after a storm.

No one survived the disaster at Wadham Thorpe and Kilgrimol, though some people apparently survived in Singleton Thorpe. Records seem to suggest they moved seven miles inland to Singleton. According to legend, Fleetwood’s fishermen claim to hear the church’s bells tolling beneath the sea. They return to port if they hear them, considering them a storm omen (Visit Cleveleys 2021).

Yet Singleton Thorpe provides an interesting example since some think there was no lost village, but rather a farm or two. Remains of buildings periodically appear at low tide on the beach, but the area is apparently Singleton Skeer on maritime maps (Visit Cleveleys 2021). Brian Hughes also points out that ‘Thorpe’ usually refers to a hamlet belonging to a larger estate, which would suggest Singleton was the original settlement, and Singleton Thorpe was, in effect, a sequel (2008).

It seems that something was certainly destroyed, though the extent of it remains to be seen. Still, the fact it became associated with tolling church bells beneath the waves ahead of storms shows how pervasive the story motif is.

The Lost Town of Dunwich

I know this section sounds like it could be an HP Lovecraft tale, but it does refer to a real port ‘lost’ to the sea.

If we head to Suffolk, we’ll find Dunwich between Aldeburgh and Southwold. It boasts monastery ruins, a museum, and a pub. Yet in the Middle Ages, the village was a busy port. Much of its religious patronage came via the Franciscan Greyfriars Monastery, founded in the 1250s.

In 1286, a storm overwhelmed the town, sweeping away the monastery and many homes. The ruins currently visible in Dunwich are from the rebuilt monastery, dating to the late 13th century and originally built half a mile from the sea. The fact they’re now rather close to the cliff edge is a testament to coastal erosion (Enfield 2022).

Following the loss of the town, a legend emerged that the port somehow remained intact underwater, albeit uninhabitable. Locals thought they could hear the church bells ringing during storms, a motif common to these types of tales.

More recently…

In 1911, another storm saw sections of the cliff fall into the sea, taking with them the remains of the church. Locals found human bones and ancient coins on the beach in the storm’s aftermath (Framlingham Weekly News 1911: 4).

Historians assumed the legend to either be exactly that – a legend – or that anything that did remain would have long since broken up. Yet in the 1960s, fishermen started having problems with their nets snagging on something underwater. Since then, archaeologists have made surveys of the original Dunwich, which lies exactly where the old maps show it was. It must have been fairly large since it had two monasteries, ten churches, and a market. Unfortunately, geology was not on Dunwich’s side. The northern part of the town lay next to the Dunwich River on low-lying ground. The centre stood to the south on higher ground, but the soil was largely made of sand and gravel. Storms flooded the northern part and the southern part collapsed with the cliffs.

Dunwich just goes to show that these tales of sunken cities or lost villages aren’t always necessarily only tales. Sometimes, there can be some truth to them.

Real Submerged Villages

Speaking of which, in some parts of the British Isles, there really are the remains of villages lying underwater, notably at the bottom of reservoirs.

The village of Llanwddyn lies at the bottom of Lake Vyrnwy after the River Vyrnwy was damned in the 1880s to create a reservoir to provide water for Liverpool across the border in England. The dry weather in 2022 left the old Llanwddyn visible as Lake Vyrnwy’s water levels dropped. History repeated itself when the Welsh-speaking village of Capel Celyn was flooded in 1965, again to create a reservoir for the benefit of Liverpool.

A persistent myth accompanies Kielder Water in Northumberland that abandoned villages lie at the bottom of the manmade lake. One legend claims the church spire still stands proud of the lake when the water level drops. According to Northumbrian Water, the buildings were demolished and the materials removed. So while there were houses and a school in the valley, you’d never find any trace of them (Muncaster 2020).

For whom the bell tolls?

The part that fascinated me about these legends is the bells ringing below water. It doesn’t matter if the deluge that swept away the village left the church in ruins; people still claim to hear the bell. In the case of the villages drowned to form reservoirs, some think they hear the bell toll even after the bell is removed prior to flooding. That the bells become a storm omen off Fleetwood says a lot about the link people have between the lost churches and bad weather.

The idea of submerged villages being the result of divine punishment speaks to an ancient story motif. Even in those cases where there is no evidence the village ever existed, the legend then becomes an origin story to explain the lake’s existence.

Where the coastal ones are concerned, they often did exist, and while some could be divine retribution or a natural disaster, the legends tend closer towards the latter as a cause. This may be because they were closer to living memory at the time the legends were preserved.

What do you make of these submerged villages? Let me know below!

References

Burne, Charlotte Sophia (1883), Shropshire Folk-lore: A Sheaf of Gleanings, London: Trübner & co.

Enfield, Lizzie (2022), ‘Dunwich: The British town lost to the sea’. BBC.com, available at: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220227-dunwich-the-british-town-lost-to-the-sea. Accessed 2 December 2024.

Framlingham Weekly News (1911), ‘Human Bones on Dunwich Beach’. Framlingham Weekly News, 7 October, p.4.

Hughes, Brian (2008), ‘The Legend of Singleton Thorpe’. The Fylde & Wyre Antiquarian, available at: https://wyrearchaeology.blogspot.com/2008/05/legend-of-singleton-thorpe.html. Accessed 2 December 2024.

Muncaster, Michael (2020), ‘Kielder Water myths: Do abandoned villages lie beneath the Northumberland lake?’ ChronicleLive, available at: https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/kielder-water-abandoned-villages-northumberland-12060764. Accessed 2 December 2024.

Visit Cleveleys (2021), ‘Sunken Village of Singleton Thorpe’. Visit Cleveleys, available at: https://www.visitcleveleys.co.uk/about/history/sunken-village-of-singleton-thorpe/. Accessed 2 December 2024.