AS PART of our We're Backing Newport campaign, the Argus highlights Living Levels, an organisation set up to highlight an often unsung but extremely important part of our region - the Gwent Levels.

LIVING Levels has been launched thanks to a £2.5million grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

"We want it to have the same sort of kudos as the Somerset Levels or the Norfolk Broads," said Community Engagement Officer Gavin Jones.

"Ultimately, we want people to say: “I live on/work on/have visited the Gwent Levels”."

Living Levels was one of the last projects to benefit from the National Lottery's Landscape Partnership programme before it discontinued the scheme as it was.

Landscape Partnerships were set up to help landscapes which are in trouble or in danger of being forgotten about, and to provide them with a sustainable future.

South Wales Argus:

Starling murmuration over the Newport Wetlands

Mr Jones said the first hurdle to get over was to make people aware of just how vast the Levels are.

"The first thing I always ask people during our presentations is “do you know the Gwent Levels?”," he said.

"They say, “oh yeah, it’s the bit around Nash and Goldcliff”.

"But actually, the best way to describe it is ‘everything to your left off the Severn Bridge, all the way to Cardiff.

"We were one of the bigger Landscape Partnerships in the country by sheer area."

South Wales Argus:

Dragonfly on Gwent Levels

The Gwent Levels encompass an area of roughly 30 miles by six miles, almost the size of a small county. This is partly why Living Levels is such a huge project in terms of undertaking.

"The areas chosen to be a part of the Landscape Partnership scheme must have some form of uniqueness and the Gwent Levels are unique in Wales," said Mr Jones.

"The comparison we make is to Snowdonia, which is the only other unique landscape in Wales."

Traditionally the Levels were a rural area, but there are also now the big urban conurbations around Newport, such as Duffryn and Maesglas, with Chepstow and Caldicot are expanding all the time.

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Living Levels are hoping to promote both the natural side of the area alongside the industry which has developed.

One of the most amazing facts about the Gwent Levels is that they are completely man-made. The process was begun by the Romans who, after having defeated the local Silurians, needed good farmland to raise livestock.

They began the first sea wall, a lot further out than the current sea wall, which reclaimed a lot of the salt marsh for their cattle.

However, this then resulted in the problem of flooding, as all the water began draining down from the hills and valleys. "They sussed out they’d need a drainage network," said Mr Jones.

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Newport Wetlands. Picture: Joanne Burgess

Monks who settled in the area then continued the work on the sea wall and the drainage system a few hundred years later. By the end of the middle ages the sea wall line was more or less where it is today.

They created a lot of the reen and ditch network.

There are now more than 900 miles of reens and ditches on the Gwent Levels - roughly the same distance as Newport to Prague.

"It’s such an intricate network," said Mr Jones.

"A lot of the field boundaries are ditches, hedging isn’t a massive thing on the levels which is one of the things which makes it unique."

The mass of reens and ditches criss-crossing the Levels needs a lot of maintenance and that's another area that Living Levels have stepped up to secure.

"We’ve been going in and clearing ditches for landowners who then take responsibility for the ditch after that," said Mr Jones.

"They’re often not neglected for any malicious reason, it’s just easy to fall behind and it gets on top of you. It’s a specialised process so we use local contractors."

South Wales Argus:

Putcher fishing basket rank at Goldcliff

As well as local contractors and businesses the programme makes use of the numerous partner organisations which make up the Landscape Partnership.

"We’ve got the three local authorities on board - Cardiff, Newport and Monmouthshire," said Mr Jones.

"The RSPB were the lead partner on the project and Gwent Wildlife Trust and Natural Resources Wales are also partners.

"The National Trust are important because we’ve got Tredegar House on the Levels.

"Bug Life and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust have got very specific tasks in the project, as we have one of the rarest bees in the UK (the Shrill Carder Bee) here on the Levels and we’re one of the top five locations for it in the UK."

As Living Levels is a heritage project Gwent Archives have also been a very important partner to get on board.

"We’re either getting information from them or feeding back into their archives," said Mr Jones.

"There are also numerous secondary partners such as Coleg Gwent - doing photography, videoing, illustration, construction - they're not official partners, but are doing a lot of good work with us.

"There are obviously going to be issues where people have different opinions on things but it’s a really good partnership to have in terms of the amount of areas covered."

The area has been managed by people for thousands of years and the biodiversity has grown up side-by-side with humans. "It's symbiotic in a way," said Mr Jones.

"We’ve got a lot of Sites of Special Scientific Interest on the landscape."

One way in which the project is helping to protect some of its rarer inhabitants includes creating meadows for things like the Shrill Carder Bee.

As well as working with farms, meadows have been created at schools, colleges and anywhere with a nice strip of land.

The Gwent Levels also used to have as many orchards as Herefordshire. Some date back to the 1800s, but Living Levels are trying to get the numbers back up to those levels.

"There may even be a product at the end of that - Levels Cider," said Mr Jones.

Another success story in the area is that of cranes returning to the Newport Wetlands after a 400-500-year absence. What's more, for the last few years it has been the same pair of birds which have come over from Somerset to breed.

"We’ve also had a very successful reintroduction of water vole at Magor Marsh," said Mr Jones.

"More unusually, we have one of the greatest technical diversities of pylons on the levels. It’s one of the hotspots for the Pylon Appreciation Society."

There is a distinct balance between nature and industry across the Gwent Levels. However, that closeness to industry can come with a cost.

"We face fly-tipping on the Levels because of the type of landscape we have here," said Mr Jones.

"We’ve got enforcement initiatives on the go already such as CCTV and more covert stuff too.

"There’s a pool of covert cameras which can be shared by local communities to deal with persistent fly-tipping."

Over the coming weeks, the Argus will be looking in more detail at some of the projects being carried out by Living Levels, as well as more of the history of the area.

For more information about Living Levels, visit livinglevels.org.uk