Vanishing Ground: Ancient Warnings and Modern Climate
Groundbreaking Fear
Roads collapsing like paper, homes vanishing into mud; such scenes have become disturbingly common in recent years. In Derbyshire, flash floods have torn through towns with ferocious force. Almost every inch of one Chesterfield terrace was “covered in a thick layer of wet brown mud”.
Wallpaper shredded and carpets reduced to sodden rags.1 Somerset has seen gaping sinkholes open without warning, forcing road closures and evacuations. Even the high Alps have not been spared: a massive landslide in Switzerland sent plumes of dust into the air and coated an entire village in slurry, after rock and ice crashed down the mountainside.2
Each example underscores a primal dread. The ground beneath our feet can suddenly fail us. It can crumble or flood in an instant. When earth turns to water or void, it triggers a deep panic. A sense that if the solid ground is not secure. That nothing is. We find ourselves today confronted with what feels like an unimaginable reversal of the natural order. A shock that leaves communities worried and wanting explanations.
Folklore Roots
These fears, though sharpened by today’s climate, are old. For generations people shaped stories to account for the land’s anger. In Wales, the tale of Cantre’r Gwaelod tells of a kingdom drowned when vigilance failed. Seithenîn, the watchman of the sea gates, drank himself into stupor one storm-tossed night and left the sluices open. By morning, the tide had poured through, and fertile fields lay buried beneath the bay. By morning, the roaring tide had breached the defences and drowned the land.3 Survivors fled to higher ground as their fertile home sank forever under Cardigan Bay. Generations treated the tale as more than myth: “Some say that the story of Cantre’r Gwaelod is actually a parable to warn people about the perils of over‑indulging”. Its amoral reminder that a single night’s revelry can invite ruin.4 In essence, the land is alive and holds us accountable: Respect it, or suffer the consequences.
Folklore across the Celtic isles and further into Europe breathes the same warnings. In Scotland and Ireland, bogs were not seen as neutral ground but as cursed places, treacherous and alive. If you stepped carelessly into the mist at night and the earth might take you whole. Stories told of cattle swallowed without trace, of wanderers sinking silently beneath the moss. These were lessons about straying too far from the known paths, or treating the wild with contempt.
Whole villages were not beyond such judgment. In Alpine valleys, people told of towns undone by their own conceit. Water gathered, the earth yielded, the settlement sank. As if claimed in retribution. On still nights, the sound of bells drifted up from the depths. The church beneath the lake keeping time for a congregation long lost.
Such tales were never just superstition. They framed the land as something that remembers. Something that waits. Prosperity depended on respect; neglect or hubris invited ruin. To hear these stories was to be reminded that the ground beneath your feet was never wholly secure. It could provide, it could shelter, but it could also take everything back. Folklore of sinkholes and floods became a form of cultural resilience; memory sharpened into narrative. They warn every generation that the earth itself demands regard.
This sensibility endures in Norse-Swedish lore through spirits also known as landvættir. They are guardians of particular places or land-forms. These beings could be benevolent, ensuring a site remained fruitful but punitive if humans defiled their domain. One was thought to ward off disaster; another might let the earth open beneath your feet if you disturbed its domain recklessly.5
Then there is the Skogsrå. The forest guardian in Swedish tradition, also known as the “Mistress of the Forest”. This ethereal being appears as enchantingly human from the front, but hides a hollowed wooden back or tail. Hunters who honoured the forest and its guardian might receive brilliant luck. Defy her, disrespect the forest or entered without acknowledgment risked lost bearings… sometimes forever.6 The Skogsrå embodies the land’s silent will, granting blessing or unleashing peril depending on how her realm is treated.
From Myth to Modern
Today we have scientific explanations for collapsing roads and inundated homes, yet the feeling behind the old myths persists. What our ancestors attributed to curses or angry gods, we now largely attribute to the complex dynamics of geology and climate. Climate change, in particular, has emerged as a modern-day culprit for the earths newfound treachery. As the planet warms, the frequency of extreme weather increases. Some regions are deluged by floods while others burn.7 All this excess water (or sudden drought) destabilises the earth. Scientists note that the climate crisis is contributing to “more frequent and intense natural geohazards like landslides [and] debris flows”.
Then there are the sinkholes. Once rare and almost folkloric, sinkholes are now popping up across the world with worrying regularity. In just one recent month, Britain saw sinkholes yawn open in Bolton, Doncaster, Kent, Gloucestershire, Bracknell and Devon, collapsing roads and endangering homes. Similarly, parts of the United States have experienced sinkholes draining ponds and swallowing cars.8 It seems the old nightmare of ground giving way has become a present-day reality yet again. Except now we read about it in news headlines; not in folklorish tales.
Alongside these physical events, a kind of modern folklore has arisen in response. We live in an age of instant communication: a dramatic video of a street cratering or a hillside sliding will ricochet through social media within hours. In a way, these viral images and stories serve the same purpose as yesteryear’s folklore tales. They are collective warnings retold in posts and anxious news segments. The narrative usually carries an implicit moral, not unlike the old stories: this is what happens when we tamper with nature’s balance.
For example, after a spate of sinkholes and floods in 2016, triggered by a jet stream anomaly that flooded the Somerset Levels, British geologists reported “a significant increase in landslides and sinkholes” and linked it to unusual weather patterns. Such reports feed into public discourse, reinforcing the idea that our climate excesses. The term “eco-anxiety” was born and has even entered the lexicon, defined by psychologists as “the chronic fear of suffering an environmental cataclysm”.9
Like the superstitions of old, this modern anxiety finds expression in stories. The only difference now is that tales are backed by scientific studies and often shared with a hashtag. We see it in the hyperbolic headlines (“Code Red for Humanity!”) and in the somber TikTok montages of climate disasters set to melancholic music. One climate communicator observed that in the online space, “fear goes viral quite easily”.10 Each new sinkhole or flood photo that circulates is absorbed into our collective consciousness, adding to a growing mythology of a planet in upheaval. In a sense, we are crafting new folklore in real time: a lore of climate change. Built on viral moments of natural horror rather than fireside folktales, but serving a similar social function. It warns us, urges us to change our ways. It helps us cope with the feeling of living on unstable ground by at least giving that fear a narrative shape.
Yet, as sensational as some modern accounts can be, they also echo an older wisdom. Folklore was never “nonsense”. It was a way for communities to encode knowledge and caution in memorable stories. The village wise-woman’s tale of the bog that swallowed a greedy man was, at
its core, a way to teach respect for nature’s perilous places. Today’s viral videos and news reports, for all their modern gloss, play a comparable role: they spread awareness about our environment’s fragility. They remind us that our technology and infrastructure cannot make us invulnerable. The ground is moving under our 21st-century feet, and in response we tell each other stories. Stories now with data and live footage attached.
Reflection
Whether it’s an ancient bard singing of a drowned kingdom or a drone camera capturing a modern sinkhole devouring a street, the message is always similar. We create these narratives, past and present, to explain the unthinkable and to warn one another. The image of solid earth giving way under us is so jarring that we instinctively seek to frame it. In Welsh myth, an entire realm was lost because a man failed in his duty; in 2025, we circulate images suggesting an entire world might be lost because we have failed in ours. Ultimately, when the ground gives way, it is not only earth that collapses, but certainty itself. And so we cling to our stories, old and new, hoping that in their telling we might not only find the cause of our fears, but perhaps also the guidance to overcome them.
1 Murray, Jessica. “The tight-knit Chesterfield street devastated by flooding.” The Guardian, 23 Oct 2023theguardian.comtheguardian.com.
2 AP News. “Alpine village is largely destroyed when a Swiss glacier collapses.” 29 May 2025apnews.com.
3 Celtic Routes. “The Lost Kingdom of Cantre’r Gwaelod.” (Folklore account)celticroutes.infocelticroutes.info.
4 Celtic Routes. Commentary on Cantre’r Gwaelod legend (parable of over- indulgence)celticroutes.info.
5 “Landvættir,” Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, in Encyclopedia.com, accessed August 24, 2025, https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and- maps/landvaettir
6 Kuusela, Tommy. “Spirited Away by the Female Forest Spirit in Swedish Folk Belief,” Folklore
131, no. 2 (2020): 159–179. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2020.1748707
7 Cockburn, Harry. “Are sinkholes connected to the climate crisis?” The Independent, 14 July 2021independent.co.ukindependent.co.uk.
8 Cockburn, ibid. – Dr. Banks (BGS) on 2016 floods and spike in sinkholes/ landslidesindependent.co.ukindependent.co.uk.
9 Richards, Abbie et al. “Three online climate communicators on dealing with eco-anxiety.”
Euronews, 9 Aug 2021euronews.com.
10 Iberdrola SA. “Eco-anxiety: the psychological aftermath of the climate crisis.” (n.d.)iberdrola.com.
