Ian Rappel’s plea to save the Gwent Levels comes at least 100 years too late. 

When the original navigators dug out the drainage reens by hand they used wooden spades and wheelbarrows and dumped the spoil in the middle of the fields they thus created. 

The result? A series of humped fields separated by shallow drainage runnels (grips), not unlike a baker’s tray full of loaves. This allowed rain water to run off the mostly clay impervious surface, and incidentally increase available growing area.

Seven hundred years or more later, in the late 19th century the mechanical shovel appeared and men could no longer carry a blade load of dredgings to the middle of the field and the spoil was thus dumped at the reen edge. 

Slowly this formed a dyke around the banks of the fields which turned them into large shallow ponds, from which rain water no longer drained.

We stole the water. 

We built Cwmbran and piped the ground water away. 

We built roads and piped the water away. 

We built Llanwern and piped the water away, so on and so forth.
The fields are rock hard in the summer and soggy in the winter. 

What have we done? 

What difference will a motorway make now?

Ken Bowen,
Whitson,
Newport.