Ireland’s Lost City

I’ve loved “lost city” tropes for as long as I can remember, but it was probably movies like “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Tomb Raider,” “Congo,”  and “Jewel of the Nile” (“Romancing the Stone” sequel)  that cemented my love for lost city tropes in both fiction and non-fiction.

But I think bigger, too!  We have the larger version of the lost city—the lost continent.  In particular, Atlantis and Lemuria are much better known than some of the obscure names of supposedly lost cities. I guess you could even count Pompeii as a lost city, even though we still know exactly where it is.

Now that I think about it, this favorite trope goes back to my childhood.  Yes, when other eight-year-olds were asked to do a report on a favorite subject for our third grade class, I was the one reading old National Geographic magazines and reporting on Pompeii under the ash of Mount Vesuvius. Okay, so my classmates reported on how they chose their dogs’ names and I was writing about cities lost to time and captured in plaster.

In my young adulthood, i gobbled up every story I could find about Pompeii and other lost and buried cities as well as continents. When I worked for a government lab that developed new imaging technology that could discern century-old cities, buried under muck and time, I devoured the technical reports that my engineers shared with me.

At some point though, even though I still couldn’t get enough of the lost city trope, I ran out of material. It seemed I had heard of every lost city any story had ever been told about.

Until 2017.

Stones. A black spire. It looked as if it were rising out of the water, but instead the water was draining away from it. 

He shook his head. “It looks like. . .I don’t know. Some type of underwater city. Lilah said there are all kinds of legendary ruins in Ireland.” — Charlie in The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks

My daughters and I visited Ireland, the origin of 50% of my DNA. If you’ve read The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks, then you can guess everywhere we went. I think I crammed everything I learned in that one book because I was so fascinated with new things I learned about the culture and gained a better understanding of my lifelong love for all things, Irish, except perhaps St. Patrick’s Day (that’s another story).

On the first day of our trip, we met up with our tour guide and a small group of seven or eight people total and took the train to the island of Howth, not far from Dublin. It was February and cold and muddy, but I loved every minute of the walking tour which was divided into morning and afternoon with lunch halfway through. (I described the landscape in detail in the first chapter of The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks.)

During our lunch stop, i ended up sitting close to our tour guide, and somehow the two of us, while everyone else was eating, got into a deep conversation about history and archaeology. He explained several theories to me about how Atlantis was actually Ireland and we agreed that, if you’re on the ground and water seems to be rising, it’s not much difference between the ground sinking into the sea beneath your feet and the water rising due to flooding. He posited that Atlantis didn’t sink, but instead was flooded. I said there’s not much difference if you’re afraid of drowning.

 Some theories on why Ireland is Atlantis:

Geographical Similarities: Some folks think that the descriptions of Atlantis’ geography – like a big island beyond the Strait of Gibraltar – match up pretty well with Ireland’s location and landscape.

Ancient Flood Myths: Ireland has a bunch of flood myths and legends, and some people see these as being pretty similar to the story of Atlantis being wiped out by water.

Advanced Ancient Civilizations: There’s a theory that ancient Ireland had some pretty advanced civilizations, with impressive knowledge and skills in areas like construction and astronomy, just like the stories about Atlantis.

Megalithic Structures: Ireland is home to some massive stone structures and ancient tombs, like Newgrange. Some folks think these could be evidence of a highly advanced prehistoric culture, similar to what we hear about Atlantis.

Linguistic Links: Some researchers claim there are similarities between ancient Irish languages and the languages that might have been spoken in Atlantis.

Historical Accounts: There are certain historical accounts and medieval texts that mention a powerful and advanced civilization out in the Atlantic, and some people think these could be talking about Ireland.

Mythological Parallels: The Tuatha Dé Danann, a mythical race of gods and heroes in Irish mythology, are sometimes seen as being like the Atlanteans because of their supposed advanced knowledge and technology.

Ancient Trade Routes: Ireland’s location might have made it a central hub for ancient trade routes, which could have supported a wealthy and advanced society like Atlantis.

Catastrophic Events: Some folks hypothesize that natural disasters, like volcanic eruptions or tsunamis, might have caused significant destruction in Ireland, leading to myths similar to the story of Atlantis sinking.

Cultural Artifacts: The discovery of ancient artifacts and structures in Ireland that show a high level of craftsmanship and sophistication is often used to support the idea that Ireland might have been home to a great civilization, possibly even Atlantis.

After a quick round up between us of everything we had ever read that suggested that Ireland was the legendary Atlantis, he mentioned something I never heard of before, a lost city off the coast of Ireland that he was was recorded as a disaster in ancient Gaelic.

After lunch, I quickly jotted the name of the city in my phone for further research when I got back to our castle/hotel. Unfortunately, his accent was so thick that I couldn’t discern the proper pronunciation and spelling. I’d understood the name as Kilvasteen. I actually didn’t find it until after I got back to the States, and then I found a multitude of different spellings:

Cill Stuifin

Cil Stuifin

Cill Stíopháin

Kil Stifin

Kil Stiophan

Kilstefan

Kilstefin

Cill Stiofan

Kilstephan

Kil Stiopháin

Cill Steaphan

Cil Stiopháin

Cilstiffian

Kilstiffen

Kilstiffin

Kilstapheen

Kilstuitheen

Kilstpheen

Cill Stuithin

You can see why it was hard to find in various source material!

My tour guide has his own fascination with Irish history and lost cities and fancied himself an expert.  He talked about earthquakes in Ireland and tsunamis and about the legend that Cill Stuifin had fallen in an earthquake somewhere off the western coast, maybe close to the Cliffs of Moher where we were headed later in the week. He told me about the legend that if you could see the sunken steeple and other structures of the city that was somewhere below the water’s surface, your own death was imminent.  Whether minutes or hours or longer, he couldn’t say.

It did make sense though in a less mystical context:  the sea would recede thanks to the earthquake, and if you could see the lost city, you might not be able to escape the resulting tidal wave when it came racing in.

I featured the lost city, Cill Stuifin, most prominently in The Lost Teachings of Dead Monks, but I do have references to it scattered throughout my entire Secret Lives of Librarians series.

in the Lilahverse, the name of the lost city becomes a password for Lilah to know that someone offering help is truly one of the good guys. Her long-lost (supposedly) mother, a literature professor, had told her stories as a child of the legendary lost city off the coast of Ireland, and it had been their secret. When my own daughters were little and I needed to protect them, we had passwords no one knew.  If an adult showed up to pick them up from school unexpectedly, that adult had to be able to tell them the password.  I’ll admit, though, that our passwords were a lot simpler than and more easily pronounceable than  “Cill Stuifin.”

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