The Drowned Places : Diving in Search of Atlantis - Damian Le Bas

The Drowned Places

Diving in Search of Atlantis

By: Damian Le Bas

Paperback | 23 April 2025

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From Ancient Greece to Port Royal, Damian Le Bas embarks on a cultural exploration of diving, investigating sunken human ruins around the world and the marine life that thrives there now

'Le Bas has written the most compelling and evocative of underwater odysseys' KATE HUMBLE
'A breathtakingly good book' TRISTAN GOOLEY
'The most captivating book on diving that I have ever read' MENSUN BOUND

Entranced by history and myth, captivated by the wonders of nature, Damian Le Bas explores the meaning we find in sunken ruins around the world

Thousands of years ago, an island off the Straits of Gibraltar went to war with ancient Athens. The battle was lost, and an earthquake cleaved the land in two. Overnight the island sank beneath the waves - or so legend tells.

As a young boy, Damian Le Bas was captivated by the story of the lost city of Atlantis. As an adult, he dreams of diving to discover its ruins. After the death of his father, torn between his lifelong desire and the taboo his Romany culture places on the ocean, he comes by chance across a dive shop. He can't help but go in.

Under the waves, Damian enters a breathtaking world. As he masters the skills of this exhilarating sport, diving with seals in the Farne Islands, exploring submerged Roman ruins in Naples and mapping the sunken city of Port Royal in Jamaica, he is entranced anew, by wonders both man-made and natural.

Plato's writings on Atlantis were a parable about the hubris of humankind; in witnessing our effects on oceans and ocean communities, Damian finds echoes of this in the modern world.

A spellbinding love letter to diving, The Drowned Places is also a profound examination of the power that myth has over us, and what happens when it crosses over into reality.

About the Author

Damian Le Bas was born in 1985 into a long line of Gypsies and Travellers. He was raised within a network of relations who taught him how to ride and drive ponies, tractors and trucks, sing melancholy cowboy ballads and speak the thousand-year-old Romani tongue. He was awarded scholarships to study at Christ’s Hospital and the University of Oxford. Between 2011 and 2015 he was the editor of Travellers’ Times, Britain’s only national magazine for Gypsies and Travellers. The Stopping Places is his first book. Damian lives and works mostly in Kent, with his wife (the actor Candis Nergaard); and Sussex, where he grew up and where his nan – who taught him the old Romany Travellers’ little-known routes and ways – both still live.

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