This piece originally appeared in Folding Rock Issue 001: Roots.

THIS STOLEN LAND: A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE GWENT LEVELS

Marsha O’Mahony (Seren Books)

SEASCAPE: NOTES FROM A CHANGING COASTLINE

Matthew Yeomans (Calon)

VOICES ON THE PATH: A HISTORY OF WALKING IN WALES

Andrew Green (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch)

‘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.

The Gwent Levels used to be an agricultural area, populated by smallholdings, farms and orchards. These have all but gone to make way for industry (the steelworks – now closed – and a power station) and housing estates. The skylark – once a common bird – can no longer be heard singing among the reeds. All that seems to be left are fragments of the past, enclosed in mud: Victorian ink bottles, china plates, even, once, the local fishermen unearthed the ‘enormous, elongated horns of an auroch, an extinct cattle species that could stand nearly six feet tall’. O’Mahony’s walk through the landscape diligently records these fragments, creating within a small, concentrated book a vast, overlapping history, from seventeenth-century floods to twentieth-century factories, uncovering every story and memory like an archaeologist on a dig, brush and trowel in hand.

When I read creative non-fiction, especially books on nature, I’m always looking for the person behind the ‘I’. I do not know to what extent a nature writer or a historian truly puts themselves into their books. Like all writing, I imagine it’s partly performance – a literary construct – and yet when everything else seems rigorously factual, the curiosity around the ‘I’ increases. O’Mahony cuts a lonely figure – deliberately so, perhaps. On her walk to Cardiff, she encounters a couple who ask her why she isn’t taking the car. She decides to tell them the truth:

‘My plan,’ she answers, ‘is to empty my mind, stop the past distressing me, and forget worrying about the future, and hopefully ease some of the upheaval of recent months.’ I was in full stream and ready to continue, but their faces were blank and they were twitching to go. I made a note to myself: don’t bore others with your troubles. No one is interested. In a way, I found that helpful.

I’m not sure in what way she found such a reaction helpful. Of course, the reader is interested. Perhaps she meant it was helpful to know that she ought not to include it in her book. But the experiences and emotional state of the writer is always of relevance to non-fiction. Through sharing their ‘troubles’, a reader has a deeper understanding of the perspective offered; of the writers’ attachment (or distance) to the landscape they describe and through which they move.

Walking is not simply a physical act, but a psychological one too – where the feet wander, so does the mind: as Andrew Green explores in his Voices on the Path: A History of Walking in Wales. In it, Green gives space to the number of recent publications by women walking in Wales: Ursula Martin, Hannah Engelkamp and Julie Brominicks; all of whom describe an obsessive, isolated quality to their walking experiences. Martin eschews conventions by focusing on the physical and mental exertion of ‘long walking’, rather than on the routes she takes, writing frankly about her ‘fears and aversions’.

Matthew Yeomans’s Seascape, by contrast, contains few ambivalent or extreme emotions. Neither is he isolated, or misunderstood in the way O’Mahony seems to be in her brief, personal encounter. Instead, he shares his long walk around the coast with his mates: Jeff, Geoff, Al, Tim and his student son, Dylan, who strides ahead of his father with earphones in his ears. His narrative, despite containing ominous news about the climate crisis and some gruesome stories about avenging pirates and shipwrecks, is comfortable and cosy. He dons his walking boots in the morning with a sense of vigour and cheer, and reels off a series of well-known facts about whatever area he happens to be striding through. Sometimes these facts sound a little like the ones you might find on a noticeboard or a Wikipedia article – transcribing, for instance, the famous poetic line by Gwyneth Lewis on the Millennium Centre in Cardiff, or pointing out that the series Gavin and Stacey was partly filmed in Barry. It’s when Yeomans turns to the less well-known world of coastal defences that Seascape comes into its own.

Twenty minutes south of where I live lies the pretty seaside town of Aberaeron. Whenever I have visitors for a weekend, I take them down for an indulgent walk along the semi-pebbled beach – ice cream, lunch, coffee, in any order. Often my daughter will come too and spend an hour climbing the enormous rocks – part of the sea defence – that make up the shoreline. Last summer, I took another visitor there, someone who does not know the area, only to find the harbour drained of water, the beautiful wooden footbridge closed, and the harbourside taped off.

‘There used to be water here,’ I said, waving at the thick grey-brown sludge that was left, dotted with old rubbish and mysterious construction objects. Huge JCBs, unmoving and orange, impeded every possible photograph. We inspected the sea defence plans, pinned to a noticeboard, but were not clever enough to understand what exactly would be erected here to stop the waves from engulfing the village. What I mean to say is that ‘sea defence’ is something that every person living near to the Welsh coast will have come across – either huge boulders transported from Norway, or large amounts of imported sand to widen the beaches – but perhaps not many people understand the decision-making, planning and financial costs of such enterprises. Yeomans explains the complicated cost-benefit thinking that coastal planning engenders in a spritely and engaging way: for instance, how the village of Fairbourne on the west Wales coast will be officially ‘surrendered to the sea’ (already partly abandoned as a result), whereas the Welsh Government is committed to protecting the town of Tywyn, a few miles up the coast. His style is so spritely, however, he makes the inevitable losses seem almost exciting. Although he admits that ‘the sea is teaching us now, in real time, that even our strongest artificial structures – the best sea walls and barrages for example – can be compromised when they fail to integrate with the way nature works’, he sees this as an opportunity to envisage a new kind of Wales, where ‘new urban centres’ develop inland in Merthyr Tydfil, Aberdare or Machynlleth. Perhaps the seat of Wales’s first parliament under Owain Glyndŵr will yet again be a significant socio-political centre for the country.

He even goes further, to describe ‘sea-steading’ – a futuristic possibility where cities float on platforms on the waves, creating cities and even entire nations that are seaborne. It’s a testament to Yeomans’s optimism that Seascape leaves the reader feeling excited about Wales’s future, despite an impending climate crisis that will disproportionately affect us (compared to other areas of the UK).

This optimism may arise from Yeomans’s peculiar perspective of Wales: ‘Our mountains are impressive,’ he writes, ‘but never overpowering. Our coastline has grand beaches and can be craggily atmospheric but, for the most part, it feels cosy rather than overwhelming.’ This is a strange comment in a book that is filled with a series of violent and unexpected stories from history: the outlaw Colyn Dolphyn being buried up to his head in sand and left to drown; the raucous French invasion at Fishguard; the terrible shipwreck of the Royal Charter that killed almost five hundred people; the often macabre, otherworldly tales of the Mabinogi . . . Moreover, in Seascape, Yeomans commits a cardinal sin. On arriving in Aberystwyth, he decides to enjoy the weather, and skips his planned visit to the National Library: ‘the books of antiquity will have to wait for another trip.’

One writer who did not skip a visit to the National Library is Andrew Green. Voices on the Path is thick with knowledge, painting an intricate portrait of Wales through the centuries from the point of view of the walker: close to the earth and sea, physically connected to the natural world and local communities as they trudge along the path. Green offers a Wales that is multifaceted, complex and the very opposite of cosy. He quotes a medieval Welsh poet who writes of Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island): ‘a wilderness of unperishable glory’. Such a sentiment applies to much of the landscape described, and reflects, too, the poetry in Welsh and Wales-centred nature writing – from Gerald of Wales to Edward Thomas, and recent women writers (like Ursula Martin) who have been historically absent from the ‘ranks of long-distance walkers’.

Wales, Green argues, is the ‘ideal country for the walker’. Not only due to its natural beauty, but also its comparative poverty. It is a country that has been slow to develop the infrastructure needed for mass public transportation; slow to develop roads that are car- and carriage-worthy. Walking was the main means of transportation for the majority of the population for a much longer period than our neighbour, often along ancient paths that follow the shape of the land. Paths, Green observes, are inherently pacifist. You can’t march an army on a path. The old roads in Wales were first built by the invading Romans and then, hundreds of years later, by the occupying armies of Edward I.

Green shows the way in which walking is political, social and cultural. It is an egalitarian activity that resists the capitalist individualism of car culture, where a person is cut off from interacting with communities and landscape. Approaching the history of Wales from the path rather than the road produces a history that cuts through social class. Green explores the experiences of holidaying Romantic poets and middle-class English tourists like Anne Lister alongside the lives of drovers, seasonal workers and pilgrims. He tells the story of the ‘garden girls’ – women who journeyed on foot from west Wales to London in the spring and summer to work in the city’s gardens and parks – and the drovers who took livestock to markets in Bristol and Bath, and who were in danger of violent robberies along the lonely, unprotected roads. Women walked barefoot in Wales up until the mid-nineteenth century, shocking visitors, and women drovers often carried up to sixty pounds of peat on their backs to sell at the market. Back in the Medieval Ages, Wales was such a popular destination for pilgrims that many pilgrim badges and small ampulae (once holding holy water) were found buried along the coastline. (The Pope decreed that two visits to St David’s would equal one pilgrimage to Rome).

Particularly interesting is the unearthing of one of the first autobiographies of a walker, ‘Tom Ddrwg’ or ‘bad Tom’, who led a peripatetic life in the early nineteenth century and who wrote about his experiences in Capelulo (1852), serving in the Napoleonic Wars, South Africa, South America and India, before moving from job to job in Wales, begging on the road, until his miraculous conversion. Green includes a comical paragraph entitled ‘Angry male visitors’ to note all the male travel writers who felt the need to complain loudly about Wales and the Welsh language: there’s a degree of satisfaction that accompanies reading about how Wales succeeded to annoy some unpleasant people.

Like Yeomans, Green ends his book with hope. He sees walking as activism against an atomised, materialistic society, concluding: ‘learning to walk with others [ . . . ] may open us up to a better sense of how sharing can benefit everyone, and how it’s worth joining others to fight for a better world.’ I hope that such a world is possible, and that the silenced skylark of the Gwent Levels will be heard singing again in the years to come.