History RAT, Tony Pickup, tells the story of the struggle to maintain the sea wall protecting the Levels during the 19th Century and the historic piece of legislation that solved the problem.
Maintaining the sea wall
Sea walls need constant maintenance. This was recognised in the 1252 Henry lll Charter that subsequently became the Henry Vlll Statute of Sewers. These Acts were intended to keep water, be it salt or fresh, off valuable farmland reclaimed from the sea. The Gwent Levels sea walls were maintained under these Acts right into the 19th century, but these laws became less and less effective as the 1800s progressed. In the end, a change in the law was required to fix the problems.
Storm damage
The biggest problems usually occur when a violent storm coincides with a very high tide. As a wave curls over and breaks, it compresses the air trapped underneath it. A big storm wave breaking onto a solid surface will inject that air, at pressures of up to a ton per square inch, into any holes it finds. This high-pressure air, if forced down a fault in sea wall, can blow earth or stone out of a wall. Once a hole has been created, the storm waves will wash away the underlying soil, extending the damage. It’s therefore vitally important that the sea defences are well maintained to minimise weaknesses that storm waves can exploit.
If you have 2 or 3 metre storm waves blowing a hole in the top of the sea wall during a very high tide, the rush of water through the breach will enlarge the gap, letting in huge volumes of sea water. Thomas Walker, who built the Severn Tunnel, said that, in September 1884:
“In consequence of the destruction of the sea wall, (between Undy and Chepstow) the equinoctial spring tides flow over a vast meadow-land, and… the water passed over the whole to a depth of more than 5 feet.”
If a breach comes at a spring tide, there will be another few days of very high tides to follow, which will allow vast amounts of water to come in, extending the damage to the wall, as well as flooding the land.
Damage to ‘Prescription’ sea wall, circa 1980.
Wharfs
The first (and actually last) line of defence for a sea wall is saltmarsh, locally called a ‘wharf’. Saltmarsh vegetation can become established between the neap and spring high tide levels on a gently shelving shore on sheltered coastlines. Importantly, the sea only covers the marsh at spring tides, (or during storms at lower states of the tide). The saltmarsh vegetation encourages waves to break early, reducing their strength before they hit the sea wall. Its protection was valued since earliest times and it was conserved as much as possible.
The Court of Sewers minutes of March 1745 shows how the Commissioners believed that the wharf at Redwick was being damaged by grazing. So they ordered grazing to be virtually stopped for 3 years in the hope that loss of wharf could be reversed. It didn’t do much good and within 10 years they came up with another plan.
In 1756 they theorised that the water draining out to sea through the sea wall gouts eroded the wharf by cutting deep gulleys through the vegetation. They thought that if they reduced the number of drainage outlets through the sea wall, they could reduce the number of channels in the wharf and therefore reduce its erosion.
They decided to re-route the water draining off Green Moor in the north of the Caldicot Level and stop it running out through its normal outfalls at Windmill Reen and Elver Pill Gouts between Redwick and Porton. These two gouts would be stopped and a new ditch made to divert water from Windmill Reen to empty to the sea at Goldcliff Pill. One of the new reens from Elver Pill to Goldcliff was cut and is in use today and is known as Hares Reen. The other new channel they cut doesn’t exist today as a main reen.
The scheme never achieved the hoped-for results and the two gouts at Elver Pill and Windmill Reen continued in use to this day. Interestingly, in the Windmill Reen papers they suggested that this system might vastly increase the area of wharf right across the Severn out to Denny Island, creating a huge and profitable increase in grazing land! However, this never happened and wharf kept being removed, leaving the sea walls more and more vulnerable to storm damage. The only answer was to reinforce the sea walls.
In the 1800s, Newport was a rapidly expanding town at the heart of Wales’ Industrial Revolution and its sea defences were increasingly important. While farmland could recover from tidal flooding, an iron foundry was a different matter. Proper sea wall maintenance was becoming more and more critical.
Up till now the law relating to sea wall maintenance was apportioned by “Ratione tenurae”, which translates as, “by reason of tenure”. Effectively, if you owned land with a sea wall on it, you were responsible for its maintenance. It was a legal liability and failure to do the maintenance would see you before the Court of Sewers where you could be ordered to do the work within a certain time. If you still failed to satisfy the Court you could be fined, have to pay the Court to do the work, and could even lose your land to the Commissioners. But, and this was a key problem of ratione tenurae, all this took time, as there was a delay while legal procedures were followed. By the time the work came to be done, it might be much too late; the sea had broken through and an even BIGGER job was needed on the wall! Ratione tenurae governed ROUTINE maintenance, as opposed to repair after a major storm. If you’d done your maintenance but a big the storm still damaged the wall, the Commissioners could provide money from rates to help repair it.
Unfortunately, poor maintenance standards with increasing erosion pressure due to loss of wharf, meant that the walls were becoming more and more difficult to keep storm-proof. The Commissioners tried to force higher maintenance standards on owners to keep the sea at bay, but it was a losing battle. The original walls needed to be armoured with stone to combat erosion. Wooden stakes were often used to shore up vulnerable sections as a stop- gap but eventually, realignment of the wall further inland or reinforcing it with “pitching”, or a stone-facing, was needed.
The Commissioners increasingly specified stone reinforcement in instructions to many sea wall owners. These were referred to as ‘Prescription Sea Walls’. If you owned a bit of wall for which the Commissioners prescribed rebuilding or facing in stone, it had to be done, even if it did cost a lot more than before! The Commissioners might help but their contribution didn’t cover the whole increase. Not surprisingly, many owners gibbed at this and were subjected to the long-winded ratione tenurae legal process. Meanwhile the sea defences continued to be damaged and decline.
In 1861, the Henry Vlll Statute of Sewers was re-written as The Land Drainage Act. It included a part that was intended to try to deal with ratione tenurae’s inadequacies. For the first time, landowners could transfer their maintenance responsibility to the Commissioners, in exchange for paying a rate. However, this was more aimed at landowners who wouldn’t raise their drainage standards in a farmland improvement scheme to which most other owners had agreed. It really did nothing to address the Monmouthshire Commissioners’ problem of being able enforce a minimum maintenance standard for sea wall.
To compound the problems, at this time large estates on the Levels were being broken up. While a large estate could offset the cost of seawall maintenance on one farm, by using the profits from the rest of the estate, the purchaser of a small block of land from the estate, with a sea wall on it, would struggle to defray costs.
In 1848 Daniel Baker bought land in Redwick and Undy containing sea walls already in a poor state of repair. He knew when he bought the land that he had a maintenance responsibility, but these walls had become Prescription walls, costing much more than Baker felt was fair. He did some maintenance but didn’t bring them up to the Commissioners standards and, as a result, was brought before the Court of Sewers - virtually every year, sometimes twice a year, between 1855 and 1870!
Baker felt that responsibility for maintaining sea walls should be shared by ALL who benefitted from the sea defences. He did everything to fight the Court of Sewers order, even contesting the rulings at the Queen’s Bench, but he lost, continually, and was involved in a long and acrimonious dispute with the Commissioners at considerable cost to both.
Baker and The Commissioners regularly exchanged long, sometimes vitriolic, letters in the Monmouthshire Merlin, arguing their case, and while Baker seemed a very hard-nosed businessman, he did have a case. He kept losing, not because he was morally wrong, but because he was wrong under the prevailing laws. The Commissioners tried to come to an accommodation with him, but their hands were tied by the law too. The 15th century laws, admittedly amended under virtually every monarch since Henry Vlll, just didn’t work in 19th century, industrial Britain.
1884 Act of Commutation
In June 1827, the Commissioners carried out a survey of just 3.5 miles of the 19 miles of sea walls. In this small section they found 90 faults which filled 16 pages of the Court’s minute book.
Realising their inability to maintain an adequate sea wall under their current legal powers, the Commissioners instructed the clerk in Nov 1827 to investigate the feasibility of having an Act of Parliament passed which would allow them more control over maintenance standards. The Baker case, while very time-consuming, was by no means the only problem the Commissioners had to deal with in the intervening 57 years. Virtually every landowner was failing to meet the sea wall standards that the Commissioners needed. The constant problems all reinforced their need for a change in the law; they didn’t want to change the whole Drainage Act, simply have a way of ensuring that the sea walls could be maintained properly.
To their great relief, in 1884 they obtained a law which enabled them to take over complete responsibility from owners for maintaining the walls, and instead charge a general rate to all Levels’ occupiers to cover the costs. The 1884 Act of Commutation was quite specific in being concerned only with sea defences, as opposed to fresh-water drainage, though it did include the power to take over responsibility for those roads and tracks which had no-one liable to maintain. Everyone could be charged a sea wall rate, though an exception was made for the Alexandra Docks and Railway Company in Newport, who were going to keep their own sea-defence responsibility. From 1884 sea walls would be maintained to the Commissioners’ standards, with costs covered from the rate.
The Monmouthshire Commissioners tried to get support from Commissions elsewhere in the country to help get the Act passed. In the event none showed any interest. Quite why is not recorded. It may have been that the Gwent Levels case was really being forced on the Commissioners by the industrialisation of Cardiff and Newport, while virtually all other Commissions of Sewers were concerned primarily for land drained for agriculture. The other interesting point is that, even before the Act was passed, Daniel Baker, who had been a thorn in the side of the Commissioners for more than a decade, became one of the Commissioners himself and sat on the Court!
The Caldicot and Wentlooge Levels Act of Commutation of 1884 was the first of its kind and its principles were subsequently incorporated into most UK drainage law.
MONMOUTHSHIRE COURT OF SEWERS
Liability to Repair the Sea Walls
A question as to the liability of owners of certain lands in the parish of Redwick to repair and maintain portions of the “prescription sea wall” was decided on Wednesday. A Court view and survey for the levels of the Hundreds of Caldicot and Wentlooge was held on the 16th and 17th days of August, the object of the survey being to place on record the liabilities of the owners of land, with the names of present owners chargeable with the maintenance and repair of the sea walls, sea banks, and other works therewith.
Excerpt from The Monmouthshire Merlin , 1st October 1870.