The Triskell Boom
The triple spiral is sold as an ancient Celtic sign of the Atlantic coast. The books tell a newer story.
Walk through Quimper, Santiago de Compostela or Oviedo and the triple spiral is everywhere: on flags, café signs, earrings, football crests and car stickers. It comes with a story. The symbol, we are told, is the ancient mark of a Celtic people who once lined the Atlantic edge of Europe, from Galicia to Brittany to Ireland.
Part of that story is true. The triple spiral really is old, and it really does turn up on Atlantic stones. But when you count where and when people actually wrote the word, a different picture appears. The triskell as an emblem of identity is largely a twentieth-century creation, and most of its growth has happened in living memory.
What the stones say
Triple spirals are among the oldest designs in Europe. They appear in Malta's temples in the fourth millennium BC, and on a carved stone inside Newgrange in Ireland around 3200 BC. They return in Iron Age metalwork of the La Tène style, and they are carved into the stones of Castro culture hillforts in Galicia, Asturias and northern Portugal.
But the map shows the catch. The ancient examples are scattered across thousands of years and the whole continent, from Mycenae to Sicily to the Boyne valley. The three-legged version belongs to Greek Sicily before it belongs to anyone on the Atlantic. Nothing in the record marks the spiral out as a particularly Atlantic or Celtic sign.
The atlas below puts every triple spiral I could place on one map: ancient sites and museum objects from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England and the continent, field finds, modern emblems and the places named after it today. Drag the slider back to the Iron Age and the pattern is plain. Press play to run five and a half thousand years in about twenty seconds, scroll or pinch to zoom, and tap any mark for its story.
Time runs faster in the far past: the slider gives each age a similar width. Field finds come only from England and Wales, where the Portable Antiquities Scheme records what the public finds, and are shown at county centres because exact findspots are not public. Scotland, Ireland, France and Spain have no public register like it, so their marks are museum objects and carved stones, and the bars under the timeline compare like with unlike. Switch off field finds to compare like with like. Today's places have no opening dates, so they all appear in the last stretch.
What the fields say
A bigger sample comes from the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which records objects found by the public in England and Wales, mostly by metal detectorists. Searching its database for "triskele" returns 438 records. About 44% are Iron Age, 32% Roman and 18% early medieval. They are small, everyday-luxury objects: brooches, harness and strap fittings, decorative fobs, and the escutcheons of early medieval hanging bowls.
If the triskele were a sign of the Atlantic Celtic fringe, you might expect these finds to cluster in Cornwall, Devon and Wales. They do the opposite. A third come from eastern England and Lincolnshire, and another fifth from Yorkshire and the North East. Cornwall and Devon together have three. All of Wales has seventeen.
Recorded finds that mention a triskele, by region
Portable Antiquities Scheme records, England and Wales, all periods. Tap a bar for the breakdown by period.
Show the numbers as a table
| Region | Iron Age | Roman | Early medieval | Later or undated | Total |
|---|
Source: Portable Antiquities Scheme database, keyword search "triskele", retrieved October 2026. Eight records with a withheld location are excluded.
This map has a big bias built in. Detectorists work ploughed arable land, which is mostly in the east, and far more finds of every kind are reported from Lincolnshire and Norfolk than from Cornwall. So the chart says more about where people look than where the spiral was used. But it does show that, in Britain, the triskele was at home across the whole Iron Age and Roman world. Nothing in the finds marks it out as a western or "Celtic fringe" design.
What the books say
Google Books counts how often a word appears in each year's published books. That makes it a rough but useful measure of when a term entered everyday writing. French gives a neat test, because it has two spellings. Triskèle is the scholarly form used by archaeologists and art historians. Triskell and triskel are the Breton forms.
The scholarly spelling is present all through the twentieth century, at a fairly steady level. The Breton spelling triskell does not appear in the French corpus until 1949. From the 1960s the Breton forms climb steadily, and in the 2010s they appear as often as the scholarly word. Spanish trisquel first appears in 1957, stays rare for half a century, then rises about eightfold in the 2010s.
Mentions per billion words in published books, by decade
Decade averages, 1900s to 2010s. Each language is measured within its own Google Books corpus.
Show the numbers as a table
| Decade | FR triskèle | FR triskell + triskel | ES trisquel |
|---|
Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer, 2019 corpora, no smoothing, retrieved October 2026.
Share of French mentions using the Breton spelling
Triskell and triskel as a share of all three French spellings, by decade.
What the streets say
The last test is today's landscape. OpenStreetMap, the volunteer-built map of the world, holds the name of almost every shop, café, street and sports hall in Europe. Across France, Spain, Portugal, the British Isles and the countries around them, I counted every named place called Triskel, Triskell, Triskèle or Trisquel. There are 148.
Nearly two-thirds of them, 93, are in just three regions: Brittany, Galicia and Asturias. Those three regions hold under 3% of the named places in the area searched. Brittany alone has 70: nineteen places called simply Le Triskell, a dozen Triskell roundabouts, estate agents, an insurer, a driving school, a sports complex and a greengrocer.
Places named Triskel, Triskell or Trisquel, per million named places
OpenStreetMap, by region. Rates allow for how densely each region is mapped. Tap a bar for the count.
Show the numbers as a table
| Region | Places | Named places | Per million |
|---|
Source: OpenStreetMap via Geofabrik regional taginfo, all objects with a name tag, October 2026. Names count only where triskel, triskell, triskèle, triskelion or trisquel appears as a word.
The bottom of the chart matters as much as the top. Wales, Cornwall and the Isle of Man are all counted among the Celtic nations, and none of them has a single place with the name. Ireland, home of the Newgrange spiral, has three, one of them a Cork arts centre. Scotland has one. The modern triskell is not a pan-Celtic sign. It belongs to Brittany, and to the two Spanish regions that most often present themselves as Celtic.
Why now?
The timing fits what historians of Breton identity have described. The symbol's popularity in Brittany has been traced to the period between the two world wars, when nationalist parties adopted it as a marker of Celtic identity. In the 1950s a Breton designer, Robert Berthelier, put triskells at the centre of a pan-Celtic flag. The Celtic music revival of the 1970s, led by figures like Alan Stivell, carried the spiral to a mass audience.
Galicia and Asturias joined the same family of symbols later. Both now present themselves as Celtic nations, and both appear alongside Brittany, Ireland and the Isle of Man on Manx stamps celebrating Celtic links. The Spanish curve suggests that the trisquel's spread as a popular emblem is largely a story of the last twenty years.
None of this makes the symbol fake. Castro culture carvings show that Iron Age Galicians used it. What the data show is that the link between the spiral and a shared Atlantic Celtic identity is recent. It was chosen and promoted, and it took off within living memory.
The maths of a whirl
Why does this shape keep being invented? Part of the answer is geometry. The triskele is one of the simplest shapes that turns without being able to be flipped, and its arms are curves that nature draws on its own whenever something spins and drains at once.
Build a triskele
The model
Pick a centre and place n spiral eyes evenly around it. Each arm starts at the centre and winds into its own eye. Write the arm in polar form around its eye, with θ the angle turned so far and Θ the total turn:
Logarithmic: r(θ) = R e−bθ
Then copy the arm n times, each turned by 360°/n. With n = 3 you get the triskele.
The two spirals look alike but behave differently. In an Archimedean spiral the gaps between turns stay the same, like a coiled rope or a groove pecked at a steady spacing. In a logarithmic spiral each turn is a fixed ratio bigger than the last, so it looks the same at every scale and always crosses its own radius at the same angle. Evenly spaced carved grooves are closer to the Archimedean kind; whirlpools and storms draw the logarithmic one.
Try the two buttons. Turning by 120° lands the figure exactly on itself. Mirroring it does not: you get a triskele spinning the other way, which no rotation can turn back into the first.
Turns but cannot flip
Spin plus drain makes a spiral
Logarithmic spirals are what moving fluid draws when it does two things at once: it circles a point and it is drawn into it. Call the strength of the circling Γ and the strength of the draining m. Every particle then crosses the lines out from the centre at the same angle α:
That constant angle is exactly the defining property of a logarithmic spiral. It is why bathwater, hurricanes and the arms of galaxies all curl the same way.
The figure puts three of these spinning drains, called spiral vortices, at the corners of a triangle and lets particles flow. With pure spin (α = 0°) you get circles. Add some drain and the paths become spirals feeding three eyes, and the whole field organises itself into a triskele.
So the shape is not only a human idea. Anyone who has watched water turn in a river eddy has seen something close to it, which may help explain why it appears independently in so many places.
Three spiral vortices
A triskele wallpaper
Its symmetry group: three rotations, no reflections. That makes it chiral, like a left and a right hand.
A logarithmic spiral crosses every ray from its centre at one fixed angle. Spin plus drain gives tan α = m/Γ.
Tiled on a triangular grid, triskeles form one of the 17 wallpaper groups, the one with only three-fold turns.
In short
The ancient triple spiral turns up across Europe, from Malta to Mycenae to the fields of Lincolnshire. The modern triskell is concentrated in Brittany, Galicia and Asturias, and it spread mostly after 1960.
The two maps barely overlap. The symbol is old, but its job as a badge of Atlantic Celtic identity is new.
Notes
- Google Books Ngram data are case-sensitive word counts in scanned books, with some scanning errors. Figures are decade means of yearly frequencies (smoothing 0), multiplied by a billion. French uses the fr-2019 corpus, Spanish es-2019 and English en-2019. English triskele and triskelion stay flat and low across the century and are not plotted.
- Trisquel is also the name of a Linux distribution, which probably inflates the Spanish figures for the 2010s. Separating the two uses needs the underlying book texts.
- Atlas: ancient sites and modern uses are hand-compiled and are a starting sample, not a census. Field finds are placed at county centres and dated to the start of their broad period. Today's places come from OpenStreetMap via the Overpass API, with duplicates of the same name within about 200 metres merged; 127 of the 148 counted names returned locations. Maths figures are drawn live from the formulas shown. Sources: Sources: Triskelion (Wikipedia); Tarxien Temples (Wikipedia); Nakajima, on the triskell in modern Brittany; Flags of the World, pan-Celtic flags; Copeps, on the triskell and the 1970s revival; Breizh Amerika, on heraldic and flag uses.
- Portable Antiquities Scheme: keyword search for "triskele". A keyword match means the record's text mentions a triskele, usually in the description of the decoration. Some records may mention it only in comparison. Regions group the counties as recorded by the Scheme.
- OpenStreetMap counts come from Geofabrik's regional taginfo, which lists every distinct value of the name tag in each region. I searched for "trisk" and "trisqu" and kept names where the symbol's name stands as a word. This drops place names such as Kiltrisk in Ireland, words like Industriskellet in Danish, and the Breton farm cooperative Triskalia. Names are counted once per mapped object, so a long road split into sections can count more than once. Regions are Geofabrik's extracts; Ireland covers the whole island.
- Ngram query: French spellings, Spanish trisquel.