BRITISH STORMS UNCOVER MAGICAL 5,000 YEAR OLD FOREST WHERE LEGEND SAYS AN ANCIENT PRIESTESS CAUSED TREES TO BE FLOODED

Beach washed away reveals ancient oaks and pines

• The ancient forest was covered in peat before eventually being swallowed by the sea
• Legends say trees and nearby township were flooded after a priestess neglected a magical well
• Conditions inside the peat, devoid of oxygen and slightly alkaline, have meant the stumps survived
• They were uncovered by the latest set of storms which washed away the peat layer.

Rising from the beach in a surreal seascape, the remains of these ancient trees have been revealed by the storms.

Thought to date back to the Bronze Age, the shin-high stumps became visible for the first time when the peat which once covered them was washed away in torrential rain and waves pounding the shore.  Now they stud the beach near the village of Borth, Ceredigion, Mid Wales – an area already rich in archaeology, opposite the alleged site of Wales’s own take on the lost city of Atlantis.

 

Folklore has it that Cantre’r Gwaelod, or the Sunken Hundred, a once-fertile land and township, was lost beneath the waves in a mythical age.  The land is said to have extended 20 miles west of the present Cardigan Bay, but disaster struck and Cantre’r Gwaelod was lost to floods when Mererid, the priestess of a fairy well, apparently neglected her duties and allowed the well to overflow.

 

Archaeologists knew the 5,000-year-old forest existed on the beach at Borth and stumps were sometimes visible along parts of it at low tide.

See pictures of mysterious and surreal seascape here
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2564285/5-000-year-old-forest-unearthed-storms-Beach-washed-away-reveal-ancient-oaks-pines.html

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