A seaside village out of sight of the sea.  An isolated village ‘miles from anywhere’.  No cinema, no bingo hall, no motel, no concrete slabs of new architecture.  No motorway.

 

Four times in three weeks I have spent an afternoon there.  On each visit I have felt envy of the folk of Redwick, envy of their self-contained, busy, utterly friendly lives.  Did I sense a suspicion of sympathy in their attitude to their visitor from Newport?

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Not that they expressed such sympathy.  They were too well-bred for such crudity.  They leave crudity and vulgarity and ill manners to TV, especially at weekends – when they switch off.

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A few houses cluster close to the church.  Big houses, some of them ancient, act as scattered satellites to the village.  At a short distance eastwards, alongside the reen which ends at Coldharbour Pill, square, assured, stands Great House – the Ty Mawr of old.

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Additions

One of the charms of this sea-moor land is the method used to enlarge the old houses.

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At Undy, at the Bryn, and again here, rooms have been added at the rear, which necessitated a continuation of the rear roof; this was possible because of the height of the original house.The enormous thickness of ‘exterior’ walls inside the houses is explained by these extensions.

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At Great House the bricklayer as well as the stone-mason took important functions.  The splendid barn seen in my smaller illustration shows how artificers in brick, stone, oak and tiles worked, as it were, hand in hand.  Great quoins I expected, but not ‘port-hole’ lights.  My readers may remember similar port-holes at ‘Poet’s Castle’ above Llanellen, where I was told that cannon could be fired through them.

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Now each of these circular lights at Great House was decorated with four key-stones and 24 bricks, each beautifully tapered.  Similarly, tapering bricks were used in the arches above windows and doors, including the doorway, 14 feet high, which admitted the great wains.

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Cider House

At the far end of the barn was the cider-house.  None of the equipment remains, but I had noted the stone roller and trough in my sketch of the church; surely, I thought, an unusual place, against a church wall, to deposit such relics.

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Where was the cider stored? In the cellar, which was of course a ground floor room at the remote corner of Great House.  Above the cider-house was the pigeon-house.

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Mr Courtenay Waters and his charming wife (whose maiden name was Aves Payne) showed me their house.  Much care had gone into several reconstructions, and none of the original windows, doorways or beams remained, yet I got the impression that this sold stone structure was of the seventeenth century, when the farmers used their wealth in providing homes of comfort and convenience.  At Great House the custom was followed of banishing cooking, baking and washing to the external kitchen.

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In comfortable chairs around the fire I listened and Mr Waters talked.  Perhaps you would like to plug into the talk:

‘Yes, Roman pottery was found, lots of fragments, on my land.  It turned up on ‘the shelf’, one of the two levels covered at high water, but now that the sea wall has been repaired, no more will be found.  I agree that there must have been something of an inlet, of a small anchorage, hereabouts, and I would favour the mouth of Coldharbour Pill.  Possibly it was there that some of those Saxons you mentioned landed from Bristol.’

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‘Field-names are queer.  Don’t ask me to explain them, but we have First Ace, Second Ace, Pitts, the Level, Picket-end; and of course we have Carmel Lane.  A number of Roman coins have been dug up in our garden, and I feel that the track which goes up to a sighting-point on Vinegar Hill was of roman origin.’ (His father reminded him of a war-time happening.)

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"An RAF plane had come down in the Channel.  I and another boy, a policeman and an RAF officer from Devonport went to locate it.  The tide was low, but rising, and when the others said there was still time left I saw more than an upward trickle, I knew what that meant, and I remembered how we had to struggle to land.  The policeman came last with the Severn up to his shoulders."

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Well Site

I saw the site of the well, six feet in diameter, forty feet deep, which had ceased to ‘give’ when the tunnel pumping station affected it.

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I admired the graceful brickwork in the boundary walls, and the one Friesian cow, brown and white – ‘a reversion to type’ - amid its many black and white companions; but pleasing above all was to meet Mr Waters, senior, sporting a pretty buttonhole of celandines – the first I had seen.  ‘A little girl gave them to me’ he reported, ‘and she has just gone to get another bunch for her grandma.’

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In the parlour, part of the original house, was tried the last sheep-stealer to be hanged in Monmouthshire for such a crime.  We have no details, but I guess that a couple of magistrates tried his case in the parlour, and committed him to the assizes at Monmouth.