Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Non Fiction, Places, Travel
Number of pages: 140
ISBN: 9781781727645
Publication date: August 5, 2024
Price: £9.99
Category: Ebooks, Non Fiction, Places, Travel
Number of pages: 140
ISBN: 9781781727690
Publication date: September 8, 2025
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
“A fascinating book about a very special and unique part of Wales” – Iolo Williams
‘We’ve stolen the land from the sea. And every day the sea is trying to steal it back.’
The Gwent Levels line the north shore of the Severn Estuary in South Wales: Chepstow at their head; their more famous cousin, the Somerset Levels, across the water; the Welsh capital, Cardiff, at their feet. You could waste an hour crossing the Levels by motorway. Or brush aside the journey by train. But in This Stolen Land, Marsha O’Mahony has chosen the slow route of foreshore, footpath, and country lane.
Wanting to know this landscape, and its people, better, she meandered from village to village over the course of two years – Chepstow, Caldicot, Undy, Magor, Redwick, Goldcliff, Nash, Newport, St Brides, Marshfield, Peterstone, Rumney, Cardiff – collecting conversations and anecdotes as she went. Sitting in a succession of pub parlours, farm kitchens, cafés and tidy front rooms, she captures the Levellers’ tales of bad winters and cuckoo cheese; wild swimming in reens and raising saltmarsh mutton; savouring cider and finding shipwrecks; dodging bombs and counting kingfishers. And, of course, the ever-present fear of The Floods.
The Gwent Levels are a unique landscape, sculpted and claimed from the sea over generations, staunchly defended against a multitude of threats. In this remarkable oral and social history, woven from the memories of those who live there, Marsha O’Mahony shows they are a place worth fighting for.
Marsha O’Mahony
Marsha O’Mahony is a writer, journalist and oral historian from Hereford. Her work includes River Voices an oral history of the river Wye; writing and researching a series of films about Herefordshire (funded by HLF). She has been a contributing researcher, writer and interviewer for Herefordshire Lore (Herefordshire oral history group) since 2005, and was a community correspondent for BBC Radio Wales for two years. She is also a playwright, with plays performed at Birmingham MAC and the Courtyard Theatre in Hereford. O’Mahony has also written for The Guardian, BBC Countryfile, Country Life, The Field, This England, Impress Magazine; her Scratch of the Hop social history of hop growing in the West Midlands was published in 2021. She has written for local and national news organisations, most recently for a New York-based lifestyle desk.
“With depth of research, wide intelligence, and a light literary touch, the author shows us the beauty and wonder of these wetlands, painting them and also their numerous threats in clear and liquid prose. Place is important, but what O’Mahony shows us is that people are too, and we cannot separate one from the other… A socially conscious, mindfully meandering, brilliantly wrought gem of a book.”
Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
