Britain. For as long as  I can remember, received wisdom told us that the ancestors of the British (and Irish) had ‘Celtic’ origins. Then in 2007, Dr Stephen Oppenheimer, professor of genetics at Oxford University ‘threw a cat among the pigeons’ when he bluntly wrote “Everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts” in Origins of the British ^[1950]. The late R.Cedric Leonard reviewed Oppenheimer’s claims in his book and two earlier papers^(d)(e)(f).

Britain as the home of Atlantis has been claimed by many writers and not without undertones of nationalism by some of the British authors. Nevertheless, support for the idea has been offered by a number of more disinterested researchers. Probably the first to advance this idea was John Wallis (1660-1703), who, in 1700, proposed that the Atlantis story had been corrupted over time and was a reference to the destruction of the landbridge that had existed between France and England, leaving a British Atlantis more isolated (The original Brexit!)^(c).  It was nearly a century before the idea was taken up by Thomas Pennant and then more than another century passed before Cooper, Spence, Beaumont and Calestani produced related theories. Fast forward to the 21st century, when Donald Ingram identifies the Wessex II culture as Atlantean and Melville Nicholls considers Britain to be one of the Atlantean islands referred to by Plato.

The precise location, the exact date and the probable cause of the destruction of Atlantis are the basis for a range of theories. There is general acceptance that following the deglaciation at the end of the last Ice Age vast regions of low-lying land that had linked Ireland and Britain to mainland Europe were gradually flooded.

One school of thought is that these flooded regions contained Atlantis, of which the most extensive was in the North Sea and is now known as Doggerland. Other offshore locations proposed for Atlantis are the Celtic Shelf (Gidon, Steuerwald & Koudroiavtsev) and the Irish Sea (Dunbavin). These lands had been settled and following the inundations, its inhabitants were forced to retreat to the higher ground of what is modern Europe and the British Isles.

David L. Hildebrandt in Atlantis-The Reawakening ^[1602] proposes a reworking of the ‘Atlantis in Britain’ theory with some new perspectives. For me, his date, location and identity of the Atlanteans do not ring true, particularly why Stone Age people in Southern Britain would want to launch an attack on Athens, over 2,000 miles away, a city-state that did not even exist at the time. Those early Britons did not have the wheel, yet Plato tells us that the Atlanteans had chariots!

Another view is that Atlantis was destroyed by the impact of a comet or asteroid, an idea espoused by Dunbavin and Spence.

E. J. de Meester on his now-defunct website postulated a link between Stonehenge and Atlantis^(b). After arbitrarily dividing Plato’s dimensions by ten, he suggested that the plain described by Plato lay in a rectangle between Salisbury and Chichester.

A recent suggestion by a Dutch commentator, Leon Elshout, places the biblical Tarshish in Britain^(h) an idea also supported by a Christadelphian website^(g).

^(a) https://sabidius.blogspot.com/2010/06/atlantis-was-it-britain.html

^(b) https://web.archive.org/web/20090614050055/https://home-3.tiscali.nl/~meester7/engatlantis.html

^(c) https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1700.010

^(d) http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mythsofbritishancestry/ 

^(e) http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mythsofbritishancestryrevisited/ 

^(f) https://web.archive.org/web/20170113172907/http://www.atlantisquest.com/Bretons.html 

^(g) Incredible Archaeological Find Proves Tarshish Is Britain! (archive.org)

^(h) https://roodgoudvanparvaim.nl/8-tarshish-as-great-britain-and-the-paradox-with-atlantis/