Richard Urbanski
I am circumnavigating the country of Wales, travelling east along the meandering line of the South Glamorgan coast. The estuary beckons an inviting but seemingly elusive open sea, and in a place between land and water, the path becomes your companion. Having almost completed the Offas Dyke footpath, travelling north over three decades, I have often contemplated what to do when reaching the Prestatyn destination. Starting and ending suggests a definitive route that maps a destination and presupposes a journey with an endpoint. This has not been the case for me. Over the years, travelling in and around Wales has drawn an imaginary cultural boundary that has become a gravitational pull of homeland rather than a journeying ‘to or from’. Living at two places on the coast, has offered me the opportunity of exploring miles of rugged Aberystwyth coastline and the gentler Penarth stretches. I have enjoyed and appreciated the freedom of this indirect meandering and one that takes you to destinations determined by circumstance and time, without the constraints of a defined path. It was soon after beginning the Wales Coastal Path that I realised my journey was a circular one and by joining the points on the map, this was a journey defined in retrospect.
Travelling south to north, the Wales Coastal Path begins in Chepstow and invites you to traverse the line between estuary, farmland, housing estates and roadside. As I move along, I’m gripped by a feeling of familiarity that also seems unusually unfamiliar. At times, the motorway drones away in the distance, playing like a low-level mood-music soundtrack. I’m not quite sure what to make of this flat, almost peri-urban, semi-wild, human-sculpted landscape. This is my first visit to the Gwent Levels. There is something here that is pulling and urging and encouraging the senses… for reflection and discovery of heritage and time past.
I am ducking under busy motorway bridges, across quiet field margins, shy of any early spring farming activity and along the pretty Goldcliff sea wall stretch. Aber Hafren, the Mouth of the Severn is a blue-grey calm carpet with just a little sign of maritime presence on the horizon. An occasional hint of the past pops up as vertical wooden posts, punctuating the water-line. Walking the line, as many generations before me have done, is an opportunity for reflection and closer observation. I feel a growing familiarity and an absorbing sense of, and for, the past. Moving further along the coastline reveals more of this expansive, subtle landscape of land and water, a landscape sculpted by hand and time.
Edges are fertile places and I suspect our ancestors drew from the magic of place as much as from its natural resources. I’m reminded, looking out over the sea and big sky, that this was once a route ‘over there’ across the salty water, where trade and commerce were important lifelines.
I reach the East Usk lighthouse that marks an intersection, and a place to absorb the view. Unwrapping my lunch, I catch sight of a dark flickering cloud passing overhead. It is a flowing, undulating murmuration of lapwings, travelling west along the coast. The path opens up conversations like speckled memories of transient places. The birds trigger a ripple of excitement and I feel I have arrived. The last time I saw a gathering of Peewit was during my childhood in the north of England when it was commonplace to sit in a moorland and see a flock pass overhead. That was five decades ago and here on the Gwent Levels they now hold a sense of place and recollection, a welcome companion on the footpath.
Walking the Coastal Path is a delight and a sensory, cultural playground. The monotony of a blue-grey-green-grey sea-sky horizon is transformed by the brilliance of an emerging veil of sunlight that hints at the story of our ancestors, why they chose this as a migration path and eventually settled here. Walking the path invites a conversation and an opportunity to read the landscape. Meandering inland along carefully managed walkways of the Newport Wetlands Nature Reserve that take you through the reed beds, along reens, dykes and field boundaries, reclaimed and shaped by the presence of human hands.
Since visiting the Levels for the first time, I have revisited often and discovered what, at first appearance are many contradictions juxtaposing the ‘natural’ and ‘industrial’. Walking the Magor Marsh, beneath the pylons and across the Newport Transporter Bridge, this is an evolving landscape with a new industrial legacy. The Living Levels project is a discovery and one that is playing an important role in regenerating the future of a landscape that addresses the current climate and ecological threats. Connecting the land and people who live and manage the place is a story that has played out over many generations, and it seems a contemporary new ‘industrial’ story is being redefined here, one that celebrates cultural exchange. The process of walking for me is integral to understanding and capturing a landscape. Walking the Levels has given me an opportunity to reconnect and develop a deeper understand of this unique place.