Every culture has things it cannot afford to lose. The Bretons lost everything - their language, their autonomy, their history - and they kept it all in a story about a city beneath the sea.

The legend of Ys is fifteen centuries old. A magnificent city, a drowned princess, a king who escaped on horseback while his daughter sank beneath the waves. A simple story. Except that it is not simple at all - it is a geographical memory, a political claim, a spiritual survival, and a warning, all at once, and the communities that have carried it forward have known this even when they could not have said so.

Ys: The Lost City of Legends argues that the legend has survived not despite its ambiguity but because of it. Every generation finds in it what it needs to find. The drowned city is Brittany under France. It is the pre-Christian world under the Church. It is everything the dominant culture submerges and cannot quite destroy. And it is, the geological record now confirms, a real place - a coastline the sea genuinely swallowed, remembered with an accuracy that should not have survived fifteen centuries of telling and retelling but did.

The bells are still ringing beneath the Bay of Douarnenez. This book explains why you can still hear them.