Book review: This Stolen Land by Marsha O’Mahony

Gaynor Funnell

‘We’ve stolen the land from the sea and every day the sea is trying to steal it back.’

This opening sentence by Neville Waters, a farmer and contributor to this oral history of the Gwent Levels, sets the scene to this book, and these words follow the reader throughout. The author has spent two years walking through an estuarine landscape, of water in its many forms – the sea and its tides, floods, rivers, ditches, rain – big skies, fertile soils, industry.

A place with its feet still imbedded in its past. Rather than looking through her own eyes, she tells the story of the Levels through the eye of the people which live within it, the ‘Levellers’, who tell tales of things that were, with a hope of what might be. The stories are of a changing environment, moulded by the sea and human behaviour, of which some is positive and some is not.

The Moors

The Gwent Levels, or The Moors to those that live within them, lie between Caldicot and Cardiff to the north in South Wales, with the Severn Estuary to the south. An historic landscape, a drainage system was laid down by the Romans and then ‘farmed and fished for at least 2,000 years.’ Consisting of interconnected ditches called reens which take the water run-off from the hills, there are now 169 sluices controlling the water levels.

We hear in the introduction that the reens would stretch from Newport to Rome if laid end-to-end. The area is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) due to the variety of flora and fauna within it.

Protecting the Levels from the sea is the seawall, 21 miles of it, reinforced and raised over the years. The land lies below the sea at high tide so maintaining the wall is vital. ‘On a normal tide, the water will be at least two metres above the highest level of the land.’ says Neville.

Breaches of the wall do happen, and when it does the water ‘… will go as fast as a horse can run, all the way across the fields until it hits the hills.’

Tsunami

All through the book, and within the people the author speaks to, is the feeling that the water could take over the land at any time, and that one day the water might win. Living with thoughts of ‘The Flood’ must make for an uneasy living at times. It happened in 1606, when a tsunami flooded twenty five parishes and drowned 2000 people, flood markers in Goldcliff and other parishes being permanent reminders of the event.

Each chapter of the book describes the authors walk, from and to a destination, Chepstow to Caldicot to start, and finishing with Rumney to Cardiff. Some walks may be short, but as she says, ‘Making my way from Undy to Magor takes very little time. But in historical terms the journey covers centuries.’ This sentence is reinforced when we hear of the archaeological finds on the Levels, such as the horns of an auroch, an extinct cattle species; fish baskets from the 11th and 15th centuries; Iron and Bronze age pottery; even ancient footprints.

Just as the land and water across the Moors are connected, common themes run through the book as well and we hear all of these through the voices of the people, memories recounted to the author in cafés, front rooms and bars as well, all while walking across the land itself.

The fertility of the alluvial soils, rich in minerals from frequent flooding, makes for excellent agricultural land and we hear from farmers whose families have worked the land for generations and those that remember such things from their childhood. Dairy farms, once widespread, now few; the making of cheese; keeping saltmarsh sheep, which fetched a premium at market; cider orchards long gone, and growers of apples, pears, damsons and plums, which declined because of the need for food during and after the second world war.

Eels

Fishing was carried out since the land was settled, eels; whiting; cockles; snails. People remembered how they or their parents caught and cooked such things, eels once abundant now rare. Salmon was considered the ‘king’ of the fish and we hear during a visit to Black Rock Lave Net fishery how salmon used to be and are still caught. Using traditional hand-made lave nets, originally made from hemp and willow, the hemp has been replaced by nylon. Because the nylon lasted for so long, it meant the skill for making such nets died out. Another traditional skill lost.

Transport in all its forms has had a huge influence on the Levels, from the ferry starting in the 1920’s, running between Beachley and Aust on the other side and able to carry 17 cars, the trains that started running in the 1850s and the construction of Severn Tunnel and the Severn bridge.

Industry, and what that brought with it, made great changes to the land and the people that lived there. Many farms and houses were pulled down and land compulsorily purchased to make way for Uskmouth Power Station and Llanwern steelworks. ‘Fields once used for haymaking, are now home to housing, fast food empires and out-of-town shopping malls.’ writes the author. These times still hold memories for many people. ‘It breaks my heart when I look back and see how they just bulldozed our village out of memory’ Sue Waters recounts. ‘There was a horrible feeling that everything started to change…and we had no control whatsoever.’

Skylarks

Change may be inevitable, and not always positive. Once an area rich in wildlife, full of lapwing, corncrake, salmon, the number and variety of plants and animals in some areas has declined. Ron Perry said ‘…the thing I used to enjoy listening to most of all was the skylarks. I haven’t heard a skylark for 50 years.’

However due to the loss of wildlife habitat at Nash, as a result of the power station construction and the creation of the Cardiff Bay Barrage Scheme in 2000, the Newport Wetlands Reserve was opened by the RSPB in 2008, covering 438 hectares of land, becoming a haven for wetland birds.

What is apparent is how an inherent knowledge of the levels runs through the lives of the Levellers. From a young age, custom and place go hand in hand – the tides, knowing to stand on the ‘black stuff’ rather than mud, the best places to fish, how to manage the reens. I was fascinated to read about reen vaulting, a form of pole vaulting and a way to cross the water channels using a wooden pole forced into the banks, which sounds dangerous unless you knew what you were doing.

Such a unique landscape deserves to have its story told, and this book does that through the eyes and voices of the Levellers, where the sea and the threat of flooding is as much of a character as the people.

This Stolen Land by Marsha O’Mahony is published by Seren. It is available from all good bookshops.