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--> YouTube-Generated Transcript <--
· 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.

--> YouTube-Generated Transcript <--
	·	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.