‘I saw evidence of water voles – they’re as big as guinea pigs!’
If the Welsh Government’s preferred route for an M4 relief road goes ahead, it will rip through the Gwent Levels. Yesterday chief reporter Martin Shipton visited the area for the first time
I’VE written a fair few stories about plans for an M4 relief road near Newport over the years. Sometimes I’ve referred to the Gwent Levels and sometimes I haven’t.
Most stories about the relief road focus on the need to relieve traffic congestion in and around the Brynglas Tunnels.
The predominant message is that the Welsh economy is being held back by gridlocked and slow-moving traffic, and that a relief road around Newport will cure the problem.
For balance, a passing reference might be made to the Gwent Levels, and how environmentalists argue that they constitute a unique landscape that deserves to be protected.
If the “Gwent Levels” means no more than two words on a page, this might easily be seen to be a subsidiary issue. But last week I came to the conclusion that the area through which the Welsh Government proposes to build a relief road deserves more attention.
An opinion poll we commissioned suggested there was strong support for building the road. But how many of the road’s supporters have been to the area through which it would run, and have they given serious consideration to what would be lost?
I wanted to put right the fact that I’d never visited the Gwent Levels. It would be wrong to suggest that I’d never thought of doing so, but as a non-driver it’s not as easy to access as it should be, and I simply hadn’t got round to organising a trip.
I know Sarah Harris, the press officer of Gwent Wildlife Trust, who used to be a colleague, and she agreed to organise a tour of the area for me, together with the trust’s chief executive Ian Rappel and his deputy Gemma Bodé.
I was picked up from Newport station and within minutes found myself being driven through an unappealing district to the east of the city full of fast food takeaways and sprawling housing developments without aesthetic appeal.
Then we took a right turn and entered somewhere that quickly felt very different. The lanes were narrow and bordered by hedgerows and water-filled ditches that crisscrossed the landscape.
We passed ancient cottages and mansions, including one which used to have a private zoo. We got to a sea wall at the small settlement of Goldcliff, climbed a few steps up it and looked across at Somerset. I was told how the area was below sea level and that the Romans had built both an earlier wall and designed the original ditch system.
A lovely church at Redwick had on its side a sign denoting the height of the Great Flood of 1606, and above its door a mural denoting drowning animals who weren’t saved by a Noah.
At the Trust’s Magor Marsh Nature Reserve I saw evidence of water voles – they’re as big as guinea pigs! – and dragonflies.
Watched by some swans, I followed the example of thousands of schoolchildren who visit the reserve each year and tried my hand with a net to see what I could pick up from an area of water near where some volunteers affectionately known as Levellers – a term which evokes early Socialists from the Civil War period – were building a new platform.
As an inexperienced netter I brought up mainly mud, but Gemma found snails, water beetles and dragonfly larva.
Not far away is the proposed route of the relief road.
I asked Ian why the Trust was so concerned about the relief road that it had been prepared to spend £30,000 on opposing the scheme at the public inquiry.
He said: “There are 900 miles of waterways across this fantastic landscape, with ditches and reens [artificial drainage channels]. It’s a fabulous environment, and what it’s a very good example of is what I suppose we would call a co-evolved landscape.
“So as the communities here, and the farmers and the villagers have used the land, they’ve also been maintaining these ditches – and as a result of that, the water is absolutely thick with life.
“There are hundreds and hundreds of species of invertebrates: beetles, snails and so on, which are the bedrock of the foodchain.
“That works its way up to otters, egrets, herons and ducks. The fact that it’s so rich in life and so historic is the reason why it’s got multiple layers of designation.
“Just off the coast and tidal mud flats, we’ve also got examples of footprints going back 4,000 years. It’s a very special landscape, but it’s one of
The ecological repercussions on wildlife, on hydrology and on the local communities will be quite devastating
IAN RAPPEL
those areas where, if you’re zooming past on the motorway and look down to your left, it just looks like flat land prime for development.
“The implications of building a relief road through here would be very, very serious, in our view, and I think also in the view of people like Natural Resources Wales.
“It’s a very complicated hydrology across the levels because it’s developed over more than 1,000 years. The first concern we have is that it will break the connectivity across the landscape – a bit like putting a kind of Berlin Wall through the Gwent Levels.
“We don’t know what the consequences of that would be, except that it would stop wildlife moving from one end to the other.
“The dangers associated with it are pollution from the road itself.
“It would change the ambiance and the feel of the Levels as well, because in many places you’re talking about the road being on quite a high bund.
“The bridge at Newport that they’ve put into the scheme I believe is as high as one of the Severn Crossings. It’s not something that’s very subtle in a flat landscape like this.
“You don’t get many areas like this in Wales, frankly. We’re renowned for what? Our hills and our mountains – and here we have this flat, almost eastern England landscape: a lovely little pocket.
“Our concern is it will change the character, but the ecological repercussions on wildlife, on hydrology and on the local communities will be quite devastating.”
Asked how he would respond to those who would say, that’s all very well, but we need the road to relieve the congestion, he said: “First of all there’s empathy, because we’re all commuters: there’s no point pretending that we’re not.
“We all get stuck in traffic jams – I got stuck in one today again. But the solution to what is a very dire 21st century dilemma is not to go back to the Sixties and produce something as basic and crude as a new motorway.
“If we look at the time savings they’re talking about, at the public inquiry the Welsh Government said by the middle of the century it could save the average journey time between nine and 11 minutes.
“Now that’s not an awful lot of time saving, and in exchange for what? This beautiful, wonderful landscape which is rich with life: if you fell into these reens, you’d be surrounded by a soup of invertebrates. If you were as small as them, it would be like being inside the rainforest, thick with life.
“A question to the commuters who might want to finish their journey quicker could be, how much longer does this sort of mentality go on? If you go across Wales, there’s loads of pinchpoints in the transport network, and there’s loads and loads of traffic jams. If the logic of this scheme continues, you’ll just end up building more roads to replace old roads to replace new roads.
“We saw in the public inquiry this genuine belief that if you build another road, that will solve the problem. And we feel, and the evidence from our witnesses in the inquiry was, it will just fill up again.”
My conclusion after what was a momentous trip? I’m with the dragonflies.