It was 9am on 30th January 1607, and the people of south Wales and the south west of England were going about their business as usual. Completely unaware of the horror that was approaching at a rate of knots.
Contemporary accounts describe what the people of places like Cardiff, Newport, Burnham-on-Sea and Ilfracombe saw that fateful morning when they looked out across the Bristol Channel. “A wall of water that did shut out even the sun”.
What was worse, this watery leviathan was fast moving. “No man could outrun it, even if riding on a galloping horse”. Over 2,000 people lost their lives that day. Thousands more died from the aftermath as famine set in. All the livestock had been drowned, top soil had been washed away and salt water contaminated the soil so no crops could grow for years afterwards. Even fresh drinking water became scarce as sea water had contaminated all the wells.
Pretty dramatic stuff I’m sure you would agree, and a story that needs to be told. So I have been planning on making a film about this event for some time.
Why this event?
I lived for many years in the pretty little village of Redwick on the Gwent Levels in Monmouthshire. A place which was wiped out at the time and has a marker on the church walls which shows how high the standing flood water was after the initial wave had gone. So, I was already aware of the event the history books call “The Great Flood”. My knowledge however was quite scant so I knew I needed to do some serious research to do it justice. Once I started pulling the various strands of research together however, I realised that this task was way too big for me to undertake on my own. So I reached out to various experts. Many in fields you would not associate with a history piece.
Archivists, meteorologists, geologists, geographers and even volcanologists all played their part in the making of this film. I learned so much more from doing this project than I ever could have imagined.
My Objectives With This Film
There were a few things I was particularly keen to do with this film.
The first was to make sure that proper emphasis was put on the price paid by the people and communities of south Wales. When I saw that Channel 5 had made a documentary called “The Killer Wave” about the event I was really interested. But was so dissapointed when I watched it to discover that it focussed entirely on the town of Barnstaple with hardly a mention of the impact on the south Wales coast. So to redress the balance my film focusses predominantly on places in Glamorgan and Monmouthshire. Barnstaple gets mentioned once.
Nothing personal – just that you’ve had your film. Now its our turn.
I also wanted to fill in some gaps in the history books. In additions to the loss of lives, livestock and property, significant buildings were lost that have never been replaced. Entire communities had to be rebuilt as 24 parishes had been lost to the waters. Also a rash of ports mysteriously disappeared around this time. I wanted to verify what was lost because of the flood and what was lost to other events (because as you will learn from this film, there were others).
Finally, I wanted to recreate some of the key events. I know not everyone is a fan of AI, but it is so much cheaper and easier to work with than CGI. So I used it to do some re-enactments and reconstructions to give a visual account of what happened.
Anyway, enough of me rambling on. The film is now done. It is 30 minutes long and it is available to watch on my YouTube channel. Please like and subscribe as the cool kids say.
To watch it from this page, simply click the image below to watch in full.
And who knows. May be we’ll feature some of these destinations in the forth coming Glamorgan History Walks programme?
#greatflood #tsunami