“The Levels - a piece of land made by the sea”

- Neville Waters MBE

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Neville Waters (Emma Drabble)

People talk of the Levels, but, as third generation farmer Neville Waters explains, the county of Gwent is home to three: “Wentlooge Level, Caldicott Level and, in the middle between the rivers Usk and Ebbw, the Mendalglef.”

Mendalglef, says Neville, has mostly disappeared. “There was a thousand acres or more of the Mendalglef, but the Newport docks covered it up pretty well.”

Farmed since Roman times, these alluvial plains have been enriched by the floodwaters of the Severn. When in 1941 Neville’s father put a piece of his grassland to the plough as part of the war effort the yield was over twice the national average: “I remember looking up at Father’s shoulder and there was the top of the wheat: a fantastic crop,” recalls Neville.

However, like the Dutch polders, most of this land lies below sea level and the price of fertility is the ever-present threat of flooding. “The Romans were the first to record building a sea wall here,” reports Neville. (The National Museum of Wales’ Goldcliff Stone, discovered in 1874, may commemorate the Roman sea wall.) And the battle to contain the sea has continued ever since. “Storms can make a huge difference. A breach, maybe only a few yards, and the water comes in like billy-o, as fast as a horse can run!”

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Life on the Levels

“We have a good community here”

- Farmer Roley Price

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Roley Price (Emma Drabble)

Roley and Ann have farmed at Channel View in Redwick for around half a century. “We take pride in the village,” says Roley. “It’s a good community,” adds Ann.

Roley was born here. After Trevor, his father, married Caerphilly Land Army girl Gwyneth Commerson the family took on a smallholding. They managed a small herd, baby Roley “popped in a handy cake tin as Mother milked the cows”, while Trevor drove the milk from neighbouring farms to Marshfield Dairy. There were eggs to be collected, cider apples to be bagged up for Bulmers in Hereford and even a pet donkey to teach Roley a lesson: “I put a thistle up her ass once and she kicked me!”

When his father fell ill 12-year-old Roley would milk the cows before school. Market days meant more time out of the classroom: “I was already working for the auctioneers in Newport at 13. I learned more than at school.”

Now the couple run their own 80-strong dairy herd. “There are six dairy farms within a three-mile radius of here.” Many still trade in the traditional way, buying on trust and meeting bills up to several thousand pounds when the money comes in. As Roley explains: “Your word has got to be good.”

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Life on the Levels

Life on the Levels Interview:

Rowland Price, a dairy and sheep farmer from Redwick, talks about farming, orchards and cider making, SSSIs, sheep sales at Marshfield and saltmarsh sheep, pollution from steelworks.

“I remember the German bombers going over.”

- Stephanie Davies, farmer’s daughter (Rumney)

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Stephanie Davies (Nanette Hepburn)

“We cycled or walked everywhere,” says Stephanie Davies of Upper Newton Farm as she recalls life on the Levels and the disruption that war brought.

Hand milking the Davies family’s dairy herd and running a milk round without electricity (power didn’t reach these parts until the 1950s) was hard enough. But managing the little farm after it took a direct hit from a German bomb didn’t make life easier. “One cow, she was blown out of the shed by the blast! They found her wandering up the next morning with the chain still round her neck. Alive!”

The nonagenarian farmer’s daughter remembers the itinerant reen cleaners who came to stay once a year: “We’d put a bed up for them in the barn. They were very strong men and they kept the reens clean with just a spade and a fork.”

She watched army lorries bringing unexploded ordnance onto the Levels (“they must have dumped them in the mud on what we called the lynches”) and generous GIs dishing out sweets. “We always did very well for food despite the rationing, but,” she admits, “it made such a difference to the work when we finally had the electricity.”

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Life on the Levels

Life on the Levels Interview

Stephanie is the daughter of farmers from Rumney. She remembers the war and how it affected the area; her family home was bombed and they had to move out to other accommodation. She remembers the Home Guard on the seawall and many other fascinating details of this area.

“My father was an Italian prisoner of war.”

- Mike Mazzoleni, former Llanwern steel worker (Whitson)

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Mike Mazzoleni (Emma Drabble)

▶ Watch interview with Mike Mazzoleni

“My father was an Italian prisoner of war and he was brought over to Llantarnam, a large Italian POW camp, after being captured in Europe somewhere. Every day the prisoners would be allocated to certain farms in this area. And after several appearances on Court Farm here in Whitson, they decided to keep him. So he never returned to Italy. And then that’s when he met my mother at the local dance down at the Farmer’s Arms in Goldcliff, and that’s how I came to be in Whitson today.”

Mike followed in his father’s footsteps by also working at Court Farm, Whitson, as a young man: “I’ve followed in his footsteps. I loved to work. I used to work on Court Farm… we could start baling at 8 o’clock in the evening. Oh my god it was hard work. I didn’t need anything to put me to sleep in those days, I was so tired. I had a job to climb the stairs… looking back on it, we had nothing, but god, I loved it.”

“All of a sudden in the 1950s they decided to build Llanwern [steelworks] and Court Farm was compulsory purchased… the saddest day of my life because they had an auction. I had to go back in the evening to open the gates… and it was silent. No cows, no chickens, and I cried like a baby.

“Strange thing is I started working at Llanwern. My dad made a few calls to some Italian friends in Newport, and I found my way into the steelworks.”

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Life on the Levels

“I’d do anything to be outdoors.”

- Paul Cawley, small holder (Undy)

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Paul Cawley (Emma Drabble)

▶ Watch interview with Paul Cawley

Paul Cawley is a third generation ‘Leveller’. “I have never lost contact with the Moors,” explains Paul “My father-in-law, even though he worked down the steelworks for a time, also worked on a farm up at Pencoyd Castle.” Paul, has lived on the family smallholding near Magor since the 1960s.

He and his wife, Beverly, love life on the Levels. Both can recall the hazardous business of grazing cattle between the tides on Denny Island, out in the estuary. “You walked the cattle out and then stayed there with them for 12 hours!” explains Paul.

He treats the Severn with respect, especially when he’s out volunteering with Magor Marsh’s Wildlife Warriors. “We’ve got the second fastest tide in the world. If you’re in a tidal area, look at the little black line on the horizon. If that black line gets bigger in a couple of minutes, you run - the tides on the way back.”

As a game keeper Paul Cawley believes that the shooting lobby brings significant benefits to local nature (“there’s more wildlife on keepered shoots than on nature reserves”) and his work has afforded plenty of contact with the local wildlife from otter, hares, egrets, ravens and buzzards to the increasingly rare lapwing.

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Life on the Levels

“I’ve been involved with the history for over twenty years.”

- Marjorie Neal, local historian and farmer’s wife (Rumney)

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Marjorie Neal (Emma Drabble)

▶ Watch interview with Marjorie Neal

Living on the Levels has given Marjorie Neal an insight into the district’s past. As the local history group’s archivist, she’s drawn on her own family’s past. “I’m lucky really because branches of my family have been in Rumney for years.”

Farming families lead isolated lives – as a child “I didn’t have friends close by” - but she made the best of things, helping to bottle the farm milk, mastering her father’s Fergie during haymaking (“I remember driving the tractor from the age of eight)” or just watching waves breaking on the lynches beyond the sea wall.

War brought Land Girls to the farm and Americans to run the Rumney Sea Transport Stores: “It stored goods coming from America and goods and casualties - bodies - that were taken back.”

Listening to the Top Twenty on Radio Luxembourg (and being scolded for it by her grandparents) helped relieve the isolation until Peterstone opened a youth club. “I used to go down there on my bike a couple of nights a week.”

Sixty years on a family farm also helped her find forgotten field and reen names (Floker, Rhossoag Fawr and Search Light - “there was a search light on that field in the war”) and evidence of occupation from 2,000 years ago. “We’ve a collection of Roman pottery found on the foreshore.”

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Life on the Levels

Life on the Levels Interview:

Marjorie reflects on childhood and adult life in Rumney, close to the sea wall, Peterstone Youth Club and WI, hay making, dairy farming, life during the war, Wharf committee, and sea levels.

“We had nothing but we were happy."

- Kath Johnson, farmer’s daughter

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Kath Johnson (Emma Drabble)

Kath Johnson paints a graphic picture of life on the Levels: “It was more of a community then, wasn’t it? Everybody you saw, you knew.”

Her family led a make-do-and-mend existence interspersed with unexpected delights like listening to the roar of lions at night. “Mrs Maybury had Whitson Zoo. She was a lovely lady. If we had an animal die on the farm she gave it to these lions.”

When she passed the entrance exam to Chepstow Grammar Kath travelled to school in a neighbour’s stock truck. “Mr Jones put benches in the back of the van, because he also hauled calves to market in it”.

A family crisis put paid to her ambitions. “I wanted to be a policewoman, but Dad had a heart attack so I left school at 16 and I’ve been on the farm ever since.” She harbours no regrets, remembering family evenings playing cards by the light of the Tilly lamp, Monday’s wash day and Sunday’s bath nights, “me first, then my brothers, then uncle, Dad and finally Mum.” 

The land was mostly managed by hand, raking the reens, grafting garden roses onto hedgerow briars with raffia and clay, and catching eels with bean pole fishing rods. “How can I put it? We had nothing, but we were happy.”

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Life on the Levels

Life on the Levels Interview:

Kath reflects on growing up on a farm in Goldcliff, childhood lessons around the reens and how they work, lost animals from Whitson Zoo, school time at Goldcliff and the village bobby, childhood games, farming, wildlife and otter hunting.

“It’s all changed now.”

- Gordon (and Linda) Shears, farmer (St Brides)

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Gordon and Linda Shears (Emma Drabble)

▶ Watch interview with Gordon and Linda Shears

The Second World War made a big impact on Cherry Orchard Farm at St Brides.

One day a Luftwaffe reconnaissance plane flew low over the farmhouse: “I waved at the pilot!” recalls Gordon. Another time a landmine fell, blocking the lane. Military trucks drove onto the sea wall, belching out smoke screens to shield the docks from enemy bombers while US GIs marched by, heading back to camp at Tredegar House. The spoils of war included kitchen spoons dropped in the pigswill, spent bullets from the nearby firing range, and little silk parachutes from military practise targets.

Gordon has lived at Cherry Orchard Farm since his father, injured First World War veteran William, moved here with his wife Beatrice in 1934. Gordon learned how to thatch the hay rick, work their cart horses, Blossom, Flower, Diamond and Bonnie, and how to haul a half-drowned cow out of the reen (the beast survived the ordeal).

He remembers rushing through floods on a double decker bus, watching an old man fish for eels using an umbrella as a keep net, and the business of living below sea level: “At night you could hear the sea,” remembers Linda. “It’s changed a lot.”

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Life on the Levels

Life on the Levels Interview

Gordon grew up on a farm in St Brides and reflects on farming life in the 1940s and 50s, witnessing the transition from horse to tractor power, holes in the sea wall and German planes flying overhead during the war.

“I grew up in Utopia.”

- Arthur Thomas and wife Anne, farmer (Marshfield)

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Arthur Thomas (Emma Drabble)

St Mellons-born Arthur recalls how his little village (“it was very compact”) once supported five pubs including the White Hart, Fox and Hounds, Star Inn and the Bluebell. But it was the milk meadows that really made the place: “The grass grows wonderfully.”

These rich pastures led to the Levels serving as Cardiff’s dairy and before he and Anne took on their own farm, Arthur helped his father, Walters deliver milk by pony and cart from his farm, Hendre Isaf, to St Mellons and beyond to Rhymney and Roath. Walters progressed to a three-wheel Raleigh van and even built his own house in 1935 “from the makings of the milk”.

Arthur, after serving with the RAF on atomic warfare, left and with Anne bought their own farm. He was a self-taught farmer and when it came to hedge repairs he was stumped. “I’d never done hedge laying so I stopped and talked to this grumpy old so-and-so laying a hedge.

“Next thing I know he was at the back door: ‘I’ve come to see if you’ve got a job for me.’” Evans the hedge layer stayed with the Thomas’ until he retired.

“We put that farm right. We did all the fences, the walls: marvellous. I had a great education off this gentleman. I owe him a lot.”

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Life on the Levels

Life on the Levels Interview:

Arthur recounts his childhood in St Mellons, school life, church, dairy farming and the milk round, utopia, drinking from the reens, wartime and the drainage board.