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| · | Islands that Aren't Islands |
| 0:00 | · | There's been a lot of rain here in the UK recently, |
| 0:03 | · | so much so that land that has been drained and reclaimed for centuries is, all of a sudden, |
| 0:08 | · | under the risk of turning back into the sea. For example, a sea level rise of only a few |
| 0:13 | · | meters reveals the now-drained marshland of the Fens in eastern England, and the extinct |
| 0:18 | · | sea at Pevensey in southern England can, as of right now, be seen on flood warning maps [10]. |
| 0:24 | · | According to the historian Michael Hislop, the natural harbour first conquered by William of |
| 0:28 | · | Normandy has turned into fields, and the castle that once guarded an important coast is just, |
| 0:32 | · | in the middle of a bunch of land now [1][2]. But these aren't what this video is about. |
| 0:38 | · | Instead, all of this had me thinking about something very peculiar I'd seen |
| 0:42 | · | a little while ago... |
| · | Ynys, Ynys, Ynys |
| 0:50 | · | This is a hill in the valley of Glaslyn, in Wales. Most hills here in Wales follow |
| 0:54 | · | a pretty normal naming scheme, usually containing one of the many words for hill: |
| 0:57 | · | bryn, pen, allt, carn, mynydd and so on. |
| 1:02 | · | Except for this one. This one is called Ynys Hir. "Long Island". No mention of a hill at all. |
| 1:11 | · | But alright, surely it's just a metaphor. Does it stick out like an island in the |
| 1:16 | · | middle of the field? Well... yes, but nowhere else in Wales is named like that at all, |
| 1:22 | · | and the place is filled with hills. In fact, with very, very few exceptions, |
| 1:28 | · | the word "ynys" in Welsh, from the Latin "insula", exclusively applies to what you'd expect: |
| 1:32 | · | islands. Actual islands, in the sea. But what's interesting about Ynys Hir, |
| 1:38 | · | is that it's not alone. In fact, the majority of those very few exceptions occur right here, |
| 1:44 | · | in the middle of the valley of Glaslyn, where nearly every single prominent hill is called |
| 1:50 | · | an island. It is unlike, literally, anywhere else in the entire country. |
| 1:57 | · | You don't have to remember any of these names, but from Ynys Hir, we have the nearby |
| 2:01 | · | Ynys Cerrig Duon, and Ynys Galch. We also have Ynys Ceiliog, Ynys y Gwely, Hir Ynys, and Ynys |
| 2:08 | · | Ifan. Finally these names also occur quite a bit inland, as north of here we can find Ynys Ferlas, |
| 2:14 | · | Ynys Fach, and finally the largest of these "islands", Ynys Fawr, alongside the last hill, |
| 2:20 | · | Bwlch Glas, who just had to be different. |
| 2:25 | · | As I said, apart from this collection of hills, some the only "islands" I could find that aren't actually islands seem to |
| 2:31 | · | be a peninsula in south-west Wales, a village named Llanynys in North Wales, |
| 2:35 | · | and another called Ynysybwl in South Wales. So, what's going on? Why, in this obscure |
| 2:41 | · | rural valley in north-west Wales, do we have an archipelago surrounded |
| 2:44 | · | by a sea of grass, instead of water? |
| · | Traeth Mawr |
| 2:54 | · | The first thought that came to mind was, well, how long has this been grass? Were these once proper islands? |
| 3:02 | · | Looking on the website floodmap.net, I decided to see what would happen if you raised the sea |
| 3:06 | · | level by a few meters, as those floods had revealed the old sea at Pevensey earlier, |
| 3:10 | · | and while most of Wales wasn't affected by an otherwise Netherlands-destroying 5-meter rise, |
| 3:15 | · | one area in particular looked very different. The Glaslyn valley, with its collection of inland |
| 3:22 | · | islands, suddenly became completely submerged. What had happened here? |
| 3:30 | · | Looking at an old map from 1839, I couldn't spot anything different. The Glaslyn River |
| 3:34 | · | still just ran through solid ground, the nearby town of Porthmadog was still there, |
| 3:38 | · | and these "islands" were still just hills. But by looking at a map made only 4 decades |
| 3:43 | · | prior, a very different picture emerged. Because all of a sudden, two towns in the area, |
| 3:49 | · | Porthmadog and Tremadog, aren't there. In fact the entire valley isn't there, |
| 3:55 | · | instead being replaced by nearly 4 miles of a brand-new gulf, or inlet, labelled Traeth Mawr. |
| 4:02 | · | I had never seen this before, and 13 miles of coastline disappearing is a |
| 4:06 | · | pretty conspicuous thing. So I wasn't at all surprised to learn that this had actually been |
| 4:10 | · | staring at me in the face for years. On any map I could find produced prior |
| 4:14 | · | to the 1800s, this sea, Traeth Mawr, was right there. Some authors made it pretty prominent too, |
| 4:20 | · | on the Cambriae Typus, the earliest known map of just Wales [3], the author shows |
| 4:25 | · | this lost stretch of coast extending about halfway towards the other side of the ocean. |
| 4:29 | · | A painting from 1834 of Traeth Mawr, one that I had used in my videos several times, |
| 4:34 | · | seemed to just show a load of sand, but another painting from 1818 of the same location, |
| 4:39 | · | which is also a picture I've shown several times, seemed to instead depict quite a bit of water, |
| 4:44 | · | extending deep into the mountains. Water that was deep enough to allow boats on |
| 4:48 | · | it [8], and some pretty sizable ones too, but again today nothing is left of this. |
| 4:53 | · | Well... almost nothing, but we'll come to that in a second. |
| 4:57 | · | Miles of water were present in this medieval map, and indeed in maps all the way up to 1795, |
| 5:02 | · | dozens of them, many of which I had been looking at for years, |
| 5:05 | · | so what had happened to this missing sea? |
| · | How to Remove 13 Miles of Coastline (100% Effective!) |
| 5:13 | · | The answer lies, as it often does, with man. |
| 5:17 | · | Well, with one man to be exact: William Madocks. |
| 5:23 | · | According to the historian David Thomas, Madocks was a wealthy man with family from Denbighshire, in North Wales [9]. |
| 5:29 | · | With his inheritance, he had bought an estate on what would have been the shores of this |
| 5:32 | · | inlet [9], and he set about a tremendous task. The Dictionary of Welsh Biography does not call |
| 5:38 | · | him an industrialist for nothing [9], and true to his surname, William Madocks envisioned |
| 5:43 | · | turning what was then the small port towns of Borth-y-gest and Aberglaslyn [8] into a |
| 5:47 | · | proper dock that could serve the nearby slate mines [9]. This new dock was called Porthmadoc, |
| 5:52 | · | humbly named after him, but how he achieved this is what we're really interested in. |
| 5:58 | · | According to D. Thomas, beginning from the age of 25, William Madocks began to enclose, |
| 6:02 | · | and drain, thousands of acres of this missing medieval sea, starting from around his estate, |
| 6:08 | · | where the town of Tremadog, also named after him, sits today, aiming |
| 6:11 | · | eventually to encompass the entire gulf [9]. By 1811, this process began to truly be underway, |
| 6:18 | · | as with the permission of the British Parliament, Madocks created a contraption across the mouth |
| 6:22 | · | of the Glaslyn with a very disappointingly boring name: a long ridge of rocks, road, |
| 6:27 | · | and rail known as "the cob" [5][4]. This wall severely limited how far the |
| 6:34 | · | tide could travel in [5], the biologist P. M. Rhind notes that even in high tide the |
| 6:38 | · | sea water is mostly kept out today [4], and all of this allowed for Madocks to |
| 6:42 | · | completely change the landscape of this valley. According to G. Robinson, this sea, Traeth Mawr, |
| 6:47 | · | likely looked a lot like the estuary to its south, the Mawddach [6], and this can |
| 6:51 | · | be seen here in that painting made only a few years after construction of the cob had |
| 6:54 | · | started. But soon this would not be the case. I couldn't find a source for when the draining |
| 7:00 | · | of this sea had been completed, so we can't know for certain when these islands no longer |
| 7:04 | · | became islands, but by 1821 the construction of Porthmadog was underway [9], and in this |
| 7:09 | · | map from 1833, the Glaslyn is shown carving its way through a field, rather than emptying out |
| 7:14 | · | into a sea nearly 4 miles to its north [6]. Our missing medieval water wasn't lost to |
| 7:19 | · | a natural cause, it didn't vanish out of thin air, it was drained. |
| 7:25 | · | These islands became no longer islands, entirely due to man-made causes. |
| · | William Madocks |
| 7:36 | · | When I first started to go into this, I expected to find William Madocks as a sort |
| 7:39 | · | of Lorax-ian bad guy, you know? Draining an entire gulf for a new shopping centre, |
| 7:44 | · | or a 24-lane motorway, or a thneed factory, but no, he doesn't really fit that bill. |
| 7:51 | · | In the words of David Thomas, Madocks was a "pronounced Radical", and a "supporter |
| 7:56 | · | of Parliamentary reform". Not to mention, what was once the waters and sands of Traeth Mawr are farms |
| 8:02 | · | today. There's a salty marsh towards the north of the cob, which is apparently a very rare habitat |
| 8:07 | · | in the UK [4], but the rest are just fields. Interestingly, this wasn't even Madock's original |
| 8:13 | · | his idea, he had read about the plans of another man, John Wynn, who had the same idea in 1625, but |
| 8:19 | · | for whatever reason never went through with it. |
| 8:24 | · | This photo on the Wikimedia Commons by Christine Johnstone calls the south-west of Tremadog a "sea of grass", and that is an excellent pun, |
| 8:32 | · | because not only was it an actual sea only 200 years ago [5][4], but even today it is still, |
| 8:37 | · | in a way, a sea. Filled with almost a dozen islands that aren't actually islands anymore. |
| 8:44 | · | What was once a large outcropping in the middle of the water, large enough for its name to mean "big, |
| 8:48 | · | or great island", is now just a hill, and a small one, completely dwarfed by its surroundings, |
| 8:55 | · | but its name preserves the fact that this valley, these fields, are not natural. |
| 9:02 | · | There are several examples of islands that aren't properly islands here in Wales, to the south, |
| 9:07 | · | by the river Dyfi we have places like Ynyslas, Ynys Tachwedd, and Ynys-Hir, |
| 9:11 | · | all enclosed within these sandbanks, but according to the historian G. Robinsion, sediment deposits |
| 9:17 | · | have changed the coastline of west Wales quite a bit [7], and I imagine that this is how |
| 9:21 | · | places like these lost their island status. But Traeth Mawr sticks out, not only for its |
| 9:28 | · | abundance of demoted islands, but for the reasons it got that way. This sea was drained ultimately, |
| 9:35 | · | by an industrialist, envisioning a port with a railway he never got to |
| 9:38 | · | see complete [9], all made for money, of which he died without, having left the country broke, |
| 9:44 | · | for Paris, where he passed in 1828 [9]. Traeth Mawr didn't need to be drained, |
| 9:51 | · | but it doesn't seem like Madocks did it out of a need to crush wildlife in the name of progress. He |
| 9:57 | · | looked up to figures like Alexander the Great [9], but while he may have conquered Persia, |
| 10:01 | · | Madocks also made his mark on the map, literally. So while yes, Traeth Mawr did not need to go, |
| 10:09 | · | at least Madock's dream wasn't to turn it into a wasteland, at least this sea of grass, |
| 10:14 | · | with its islands that aren't islands, is still there, and it didn't get |
| 10:17 | · | turned into a 4000-acre car park. |
| 10:21 | · | I don't know, though, I still wish I could have seen those sands. |
| 10:35 | · | Thank you very much for watching. |
| 10:37 | · | And thank you all for 100,000 subscribers! |
| 10:41 | · | My next goal will be to reach 4.7 billion in the next four seconds... |
| 10:50 | · | ...ok-ok, so we didn't quite that one, but it's ok, we can try again later. |
