This is an extract from Hando’s Gwent, Volume One, edited by Chris Barber and reproduced with Mr Barber’s permission.

THIS section is printed in handsome black letter, somewhat difficult to read. Six pages of further exhortation follow. Then comes a reference to the damage wrought in Somersetshire, where 'ye sea got up between Barnstable and Bristowe at high as Bridgewater,' the whole of Brent marsh being covered.

Then at last we come to the account of the flood in Monmouthshire, where the following 26 parishes were 'spoyled by the greeuous and lamentable furie of the waters: Matherne, Portscuet, Caldicot, Undye, Roggiet, Llanfihangel, Ifton, Magor, Redwicke, Gouldenlift, Nashe, Saint Piere, Lankstone, Wiston, Lanwerne, Christchurch, Milton, Bashallecke, Saint Brides, Peterstone, Lambeth, Saint Mellins, Romney, Marshfield, Wilfrick.'

Over an area of moors 24 miles wide and four broad, all kinds of cattle were drowned, ricks and mows of corn were carried away, a multitude of houses were beaten down, 'scattering and dispersing the poore substance of innumerable persons,' causing damage to the value of £100,000. After four more pages of homily, we read of the speed of the incoming waters: 'no Greyhounde could have escaped by running before them,' covering 'the richest and the fruitfullnest place in all that Countryey.'

A man and woman marooned in a tree saw a 'certain Tubbe of greater largenesse' approaching. Committing themselves to the tub, they were carried safely to shore.

On this bitter January morning a mother, seeing the waters approaching, placed her four-year-old daughter on a beam. A little chicken running before the waters flew up alongside the naked child and by its warm preserved her life.

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Poor Mistress Van, whose house was four miles from the seawall, was drowned before she could get up into the higher rooms of her house and her living, mark you, was a hundred pounds and better by the year.

A multitude more than the estimated 'twentie hundred' might have perished from hunger and cold had not Lord Herbert and Sir Walter Montague sent out boats, conveyed for ten miles on wains to relieve the distressed.

The author ends his tract with this prayer: 'The Lorde of his merie graunt, that we may learne in time to be wise unto our own health and salvation, least that these water-flouds in particular prove but fore-runners unto some fearful calamities more general.'

Continue for about a mile and then turn right to follow the road down the sea wall. Standing sixty feet above high tide, Hill Farm is the successor of the famous Goldcliff Priory and some of the cut stone in the farmhouse especially in the lintel of the cellar entrance, may have been part of the priory buildings.

Long before the foundation of the priory the centurion Statorious with his Roman cohort built a portion of the sea wall and inserted the stone which cleared up in 1878 the mystery of the building of the wall.

Before the masonry was added to the base of the 'hill' it was possible to see the reason for the English name 'Goldcliff' or the equivalent Welsh 'Allt Eurin'. From the sea the cliff was limestone above and red sandstone below and in these lower strata were shiny particles which some authorities names as mica and others as pyrites.

Goldcliff Priory was annexed to the abbey of bee in Normandy whence a prior and twelve Benedictine monks came to Goldcliff and to the monks of the priory we can assign with fair certainty the establishment of the salmon fishery and the construction or that amazing reen known as Monksditch.

The priory buildings arose between between the present farmhouse and the sea. In those summers when we knew long weeks of sunshine the grass turned brown in rectangular patterns on the hill. These patterns were over the ancient foundations and must form a tempting site for future excavations.

Roots of oaks and an abundance of hazel nuts found on the sea-flats at low tide indicate that a forest grew south of the priory. Similar discoveries, 45-foot below the surface, were made when the Alexandra dock was being cut across the river.

It seems likely that in addition to the priory Robert de Chandos created the manor and parish of Goldcliff, dedicating the church to St Mary Magdalene.

When the alien priories were suppressed Goldcliff was annexed to Tewkesbury Abbey, but the Welsh would have nought to do with the new monks and drove them out, imprisoning the prior in Usk. After a further attempt at settlement it was granted in 1451 to Eton College, to Tewkesbury in 1461 and to Eton in 1468. At the Dissolution the gross value of Goldcliff Priory was £2,898.

The priors at Goldcliff lived at times not a wholly cloistered existence. In 1334, it seems, Phillip de Gopillarius the prior was charged with a monk, some clergy and fifty pother persons from Newport, Nash, Goldcliff, Clevedon and Portishead with stealing wine and merchandise from a vessel wrecked at Goldcliff.

In Commons and Customs we read how in 1784 a party of smugglers landed at Goldcliff 12 hogsheads of tobacco weighing 9,804 lb. and a cask of brandy containing forty gallons. These goods were found by the customs officers in a farm outhouse and taken to Newport under armed guard as 'the country is full of smugglers and inhabited by a desperate set of people.'

Two months later at Goldcliff there was a further seizure of 130 gallons of rum and brandy. And in 1833 the schooner Kate of Bristol, landed at Nash Point 252 kegs containing about 1,10 gallons of brandy which were found by the customs officer in an otherwise empty house.

On my visit to Goldcliff I met by good luck Mr Ralph Burge and his son, the proprietors of the fisheries.They invited me to inspect their sheds and stores and here I was able to see actual putchers and the 'fore-wheel' of a kype.