From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

More propaganda!

A TV crime drama was inspired by the “tragic reality” of its real-life filming locations, according to actor Sir Jonathan Pryce.

Under Salt Marsh follows detectives as they race to solve the mystery of a local schoolboy’s death before a once-in-a-generation storm threatens to destroy evidence and the future of the fictional town of Morfa Halen.

Some of the show’s filming locations in Gwynedd and on Anglesey in north Wales are also facing an uncertain future due to severe weather.

The Crown actor Sir Jonathan, who plays farmer Solomon Bevan in the series which also stars Yellowstone’s Kelly Reilly, said: “It’s a thriller with an important message behind it.

“There are real towns on the west coast of Wales under threat from the sea.

“The show reflects that kind of looming ecological crisis and the community’s fight to survive and be heard.”

With most of the filming taking place in north-west Wales, Under Salt Marsh actress Reilly said the environment was “a character in itself”.

As the impending storm adds to the urgency to solve the mystery of young schoolboy Cefin’s death, it becomes an even more difficult task for ex-detective Jackie Ellis played by Reilly and her former partner DC Eric Bull.

Speaking to BBC Radio Wales, the show’s creator Claire Oakley said: “They’re at the mercy of the weather and the tides.

“I was interested in how it might feel to live somewhere where your home could get destroyed by the next big storm and how that might effect things and we started to develop this idea of a police investigation that would help us dig into these landscapes.

“They had to do this under this huge pressure of an encroaching red level storm that had the potential to completely derail the investigation and wash all of the evidence away.”

Barmouth in Gwynedd stands in as the main setting of Morfa Halen on the north-west coast.

With a population of almost 2,500, the seaside town is located on the Mawddach Estuary.

The show’s fictional community lives on the end of a tidal causeway, with high tides cutting them off from the rest of the world.

Some of the seafront scenes were filmed in Fairbourne, which has its own battle with the elements.

Fairbourne is recognised as the first place in the UK which could face evacuation due to climate change.

Its location and rising sea levels means that the town faces regular severe flooding, with Gwynedd council deciding it will stop maintaining flood defences by the 2050s.

The town could be decommissioned before then to allow over 800 local residents to be re-located elsewhere, making them the country’s first climate refugees.

The real threat facing Under Salt Marsh filming locations in Wales

We have looked at Fairbourne a few times in the past. Most of the village sits about 3 meter above sea level on a sand spit of land. Until the 1860s, the land was mostly salt marshes.

Around 1865, Solomon Andrews, a Welsh entrepreneur, purchased the promontory. Over the next few years, he built a seawall for tidal protection and several houses. The wealthy flour-maker Sir Arthur McDougall had been looking for a country estate but when he discovered this area, he soon conceived of it as a seaside resort. In July 1895, Arthur McDougall purchased a substantial acreage from land speculators, which he enlarged by additional lots the following year. He then immediately hired a builder to begin the development of a model seaside resort.

In short, the land never was habitable. It was only the construction of a seawall that made the building of a village feasible.

The BBC’s claim that “climate change” has suddenly made Fairbourne unsustainable is nonsense. It never was sustainable without a seawall. Gwynedd Council has now decided that it is not worth spending any more money on flood defence.

Sea levels at nearby Holyhead have been rising steadily at about 2.3 mm/yr since the start of records in 1938. We know from other UK locations that seas have been rising since the 19thC:

It has nothing to do with “climate change”, not the BBC’s version anyway, which means “man-made global warming”. Sea levels have been rising for perfectly natural reasons for a long time.

As for the decision by Gwynedd to stop maintaining flood defences, it appears that this is a money saving exercise, based on alarmist Met Office projections of sea level rise of 4.7mm a year.

An independent scientific study has concluded that the cost of repairing flood defences is a tiny fraction of the council estimate, and certainly much less than decommissioning the town.

Based on realistic estimates of sea level rise, Fairbourne is under no threat at all for the foreseeable future. As one of the authors, Dr Graham Hall, explained, Fairbourne is mainly protected by a shingle bank spit:

“Fairbourne is protected from the sea by the Ro Wen shingle spit. The flat crest is so wide and solid that in the south of the village there is room on the top for a car park. The natural spit is also strengthened by a core wall of concrete. The shingle spit is not the flimsy structure of the misleading diagram. Recent and more accurate computer modelling has shown that even an extreme storm could not do serious damage to something so solid.

Could waves flow over the top? The spit is a natural construction built by storm waves hurling pebbles and small boulders onto the sloping seaward side. As sea level rises, the spit will naturally grow higher to match the new level of the storm waves.”

As Hall points out, the existing sea wall certainly need repair and maintenance, as all flood defences to do. Other fairly conventional and relatively inexpensive, such as raising levies to protect from flooding from the estuary or landward side, have been recommended too.

But the idea that Fairbourne is soon going to be under the sea is just alarmist claptrap.

Nobody would, of course, dream of building a village in such a place now. Whether it is worth spending money to protect it is one I cannot answer. But according to the scientists, there are cheap solutions which will ensure Fairbourne remains habitable for a long time to come.