‘Once the sea breaches the wall, it will go as fast as a horse can run, all the way across the fields, until it hits the hills. It could happen today or tomorrow, anytime,’ says Neville Waters, a retired flood expert. He is being interviewed by Marsha O’Mahony about the Gwent Levels, an intertidal area south of Newport that lies lower than the sea. The title of O’Mahony’s book on this unique part of Wales – This Stolen Land – reflects the fragility and uniqueness of the landscape. It is neither land nor water, neither sea nor earth: a kind of in-between landscape – of mud, estuary, ancient farmland, sluices, ‘reens’ and moors. It is, she writes, ‘historic’, but it is also vanishing, complex, endangered. Read alongside Matthew Yeoman’s Seascape, it is clear that the Gwent Levels is not alone in its vulnerability. Much of the coastline of Wales is changing – climate crisis, rising sea levels and the waning of wildlife are all facts that are, by now, well known. And yet both O’Mahoney and Yeomans offer a careful look at precisely what this means for Welsh coastal communities, and beyond.
Both Yeomans and O’Mahony ramble through the Gwent Levels. Where Yeomans relays famous stories: of Henry Feuss and his pioneering work on scuba diving and the building of the Severn tunnel, the fierce pirate John Callis with a penchant for torture, and the astoundingly ancient footsteps discovered in the mudflats, O’Mahony’s account is imbued with folk memory and oral histories, with lesser-known accounts of fishing, reed-vaulting and railway work. One of her opening narratives is of the 1606 flood – where the sea swelled and rushed over the landscape, like Waters’s horse, destroying farms and killing hundreds. A water line can be seen in a local church as testament to the horrific event. It is, she writes, ‘part of the collective folk memory’.
Feelings of trepidation and respect towards the sea are everywhere in the personal accounts Mahoney relays – folk knowledge of where and how the sea moves, the sluices and waterways, pattern the way of life for ‘Levellers’. In particular, O’Mahony’s account of fishing is (surprisingly for me, a person with no experience of the activity) remarkable – the craft of weaving fishing baskets out of willow goes back to the early Middle Ages (at the very least), and prehistoric discoveries suggest that fishing took place in the area long before. O’Mahony’s precise descriptions of handmade lave nets, kype baskets and pulcher fishing stand as a kind of monument for an ancient and vanishing art. She spends time talking to local fishermen, transcribing valuable oral histories. One fisherman, Martin, tells her about the fishing spots: ‘the Gut, Lighthouse Veer, Gruggy, The Marl. Then there’s the Hole, the Grandstand, Monkey Tump. These are names that don’t appear on maps, but are used by fishermen to describe where they fish [ . . . ] it was a sort of secret language.’ And yet these accounts are also coloured by loss, since the times when these willow fishing baskets were regularly filled with salmon have long past. The Levels, as with so much of the Welsh landscape, is slowly being emptied of animals and plant-life.
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