Large Solar Farms On The Gwent Levels SSSI

By Conservation Officer Mike Webb

rallied somewhat in the early 2000s and I was fortunate to be able to spend a day a week with him out botanising in the spring and summer from about 2005. I learnt so much from him and enjoyed his sense of humour. There was always a cup of coffee for me and biscuits for my dogs, when we called in at his home on Mounton Road, Chepstow.

Trevor was much involved with Gwent Wildlife Trust and for many years was Chairman of the Conservation Committee of the Trust. He also was a founding member of the Chepstow Society which was set up in 1948 to explore the history of the town; he was President of the Society. He also supported and was President of Monmouthshire Meadows Group from soon after its start in 2003.

After his retirement, he organised teams of local botanists to take on different parts of the vice county and record plants by tetrads. This culminated in 2007 with his excellent Flora of Monmouthshire which maps plants throughout the vice county and for which he wrote informative texts. He had seen huge changes in the 60+ years of searching for plants and was very critical of organisations that had inadvertently destroyed so much beloved good habitat. Botanist Tim Rich helped him enormously in the final stages of the book. I remember collecting copies of the Flora from Cardiff and taking one to show Trevor who at that time was in hospital in Newport for an operation on his leg. He was so proud, soon afterwards, in receiving an MBE aged 87 from the Queen for his services to conservation and wildlife in Monmouthshire. Speaking of his delight at receiving the honour, he said, "The award is a great pleasure. The countryside is my passion." Unfortunately, his hearing started to go and he was so annoyed when he could no longer hear Chiffchaffs singing and then sadly, his memory for plants began to fade. He also received an award from the BSBI/Wild Flower Society and was an honorary member of the BSBI until his death. He had a party for his 90th birthday celebrations in 2015.

We are firmly of the view that wetland SSSIs such as the Gwent Levels, a UK- level site statutorily designated for its wildlife, are fundamentally unsuited to large-scale solar farms.

We are now ramping up our campaign against the Magor Net Zero project - a very large solar farm and associated wind turbine proposal located entirely on the Gwent Levels SSSI. In tandem with this campaign, we and Friends of the Gwent Levels (FOGL) have launched a public call to the Welsh Government to halt major development on the SSSI.

This has been taken up by several environmental charities, including RSPB Cymru and CPRW, as well as community councils on the Levels such as Marshfield. We will be working in collaboration.

These two linked campaigns have becoming increasingly urgent, as yet more enormous proposals emerge - so many in fact that solar farm proposals are likely to start physically abutting each other, leading to the real and nightmarish prospect of our precious and fragile SSSI becoming one gigantic power station.

Farewell Trevor, Steph Tyler

As part of this campaign, we have started looking into post-construction studies on wildlife on and near the only constructed solar farm on the SSSI – Llanwern. The results are grim.

Breeding lapwings, a scarce and declining iconic bird species of Gwent have been driven to extinction in the area, and numbers of other scarce birds have plummeted. Water quality in the reens, which the developer claimed pre-construction would be improved, has remained more or less the same, if not deteriorated.

GWT’s vision for our precious and vulnerable Gwent Levels is one of a beautiful and tranquil place, thrumming with nature, not a desolate industrial park covered with hundreds of thousands of panels of glass, plastic and metal.