Low Land (1): Iffley Meadows, South Oxford

This piece has built up accretively, a handy but accidental way of writing about flood meadows. The first hint of the shape it was going to take arrived when I wasn’t in the Meadows at all, but in the council nature park north of them on the other side of Donnington Bridge Road. It was late winter, and late winter’s colours tinted the long arms of the sunset – brilliance through the clouds masked by a murky veil of dampness. Bare trees stood completely still and the air was cold as a pool.

There was movement. The park is on the top end of an island that stretches far down the river, past Iffley Meadows themselves, and beyond the ring road that marks the city’s outer edge. On either aside the river flows, wide and fast in the main channel, narrow and more sluggishly in the side branch. In summer people swim and canoe in the latter. Not at the end of January though. On the far side of this backwater a muntjac mother and fawn jogged away, stumpy creatures that leave delicate prints in fresh mud. A Canada goose sat on the water, regarding me with an unfathomable eye.

Before the Weirs Lane Estate and surrounding roads were built in the 1930s, the whole area was farmed. Until Donnington Bridge was built in the 1960s a ferry crossed the river here. The cattle grids and fences by the track must be more recent still. In late 2012 a channel was dug round one of the weirs to help fish through. And the two species I had seen were both quite recent introductions, now thoroughly settled in this inconstant landscape.

As I got closer to the road and looked west to where the sun was bringing the day to an early end, the goose stood on the lip of the weir and stretched out its wings. It did not fly, but dropped back into the current and drifted slowly by.

The only way to write about flood meadows is to dwell on change. Iffley Meadows lie about two kilometres south of central Oxford. One means of getting there is to walk down the river from Folly Bridge. There’s a short distance during which you can look over your left shoulder across the river and Christchurch Meadows towards the long row of college walls, and persuade yourself that this is a view that’s changed little in hundreds of years. In the meantime the river has been embanked and various boathouses built, and the narrowboats are homes instead of working vessels. This is by far the better route.

The other is to walk down Abingdon Road, once described to me by a friend as “the most boring walk in Oxford”. It’s fair to say that repeated trips do not make it more thrilling. But in some ways it might be better preparation for the Meadows. Yes, there’s the contrast between an urban arterial road and the mix of greens and colours that make up the destination. But also there’s the reminder that the green place is only separated from the city’s long suburban tail by a fence.

The Meadows have been there longer than Oxford – that is, longer than the burgh founded on top of an older settlement in the 910s as a defence against the Danes. Burghs were created by King Alfred and his successors. In Oxford’s case it may have been Aelfleda, “Lady of the Mercians”, who chose (or approved) the site. This means that both the present city and its tradition of learning might be able to trace their origins back to Saxon women (Saint Frideswide is meant to have presided over an academic double monastery). An interesting thought, if true.

The city’s location has also made it a sort of border town for much of its history. The Thames was once a dividing line in southern England (see Of Place 1). Nearby, Hinksey Stream, which runs down the western side of Abingdon Road, once marked the boundary between Oxfordshire and Berkshire. Oxfordshire was always Mercian, but Berkshire changed hands a few times between that Saxon kingdom and Wessex. This meant that, close as they are to Oxford, Iffley Meadows were often on the other side of one or other of the many human lines drawn across the country.

The Meadows have long been what they are – great sponges for the water the Thames can’t carry off. Until the advent of modern farming methods such areas were valued because when the river rose in winter it would layer the ground it covered with nutrient-rich silt, in which abundant crops could be grown. Now the river’s been embanked it much more rarely covers the fields. Instead, rain collects in them, not just from the sky, but also as run-off from the surrounding roads, driveways and concreted gardens. Crossing from the north-west corner by the weirs on the Thames, the walker sinks ever deeper into thick clay mud as the path approaches the Isis Boathouse.

The mud is a constant, but everything else changes. Say, January, the trees that mark old boundaries are grey and black, and the sky is long, the metal base of some immense structure. The Meadows are as if pastelled in with a succession of greens, each shade seeming to recede as the eye encounters it. Crows, magpies and pigeons shift heavily about in the open space, while the occasional robin flits in the trees. The wind seethes with cold.

Once spring starts the bushes thicken with buds, and blue tits start to busy in the trees. The surface mud disappears under thickness of green. Kestrels shift and hover, shift again, sometimes in front of a cloud, sometimes against blue. The wind and rain seem to take on the colours of the plants.

When the frosts have finished the Meadows’ most significant inhabitant emerges. This is the snake’s head fritillary, which only grows wild in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Its densest populations are by the side of the Thames, in flood meadows. In Iffley Meadows, 80-100,000 were counted in 2011 by volunteers from the Bucks, Berks and Oxon Wildlife Trust, which owns and cares for the land. In the miserable spring of 2012, far fewer bloomed.

My family is very lucky to have a couple of these flowers in our garden. We don’t know how they got there – before we moved in – but they grow out from some gravel, in thin blue-green strands at first, then the flower buds. Snake’s head, because they look like a miniature blind snake with pale jaws until they start to open. Fritillary because the red-and-white chequered blooms, which hang like bell tents over thick stamen tongues, are apparently like dice boxes (fritillarius – Latin for dice). Confusingly, some butterflies with similar chequering on their wings are also called fritillaries.

We tread very carefully around our fritillaries. In Iffley Meadows, if you crouch, you can look along the top of the grass as far as the ring road, and see thousands of fritillary heads, colour thickening to black as the distance increases.

The fritillaries have been in the Meadows for centuries, but their continued presence is directly due to human intervention. BBOWT has no grazing or mowing on the land until long after the fritillaries have been swallowed by the grass. Also, they don’t use fertiliser or pesticide – all that arrives comes in run-off from neighbouring fields, or is deposited by the Thames when it rises.

I am very keen on the fritillaries, but for me the Meadows are at their best after those flowers have gone, and others take their place – black knapweed, yellow rattle, scabious, ragged robin – hip high and attended by bees, beetles, butterflies and bugs. All this colour reaches its height in June. I think of a humid, sweaty day, and hear insect wings and birdsong like an insistent pressure on my ear. For me it’s the pinnacle of life in the Meadows.

The mowers usually come in July. Replicating older patterns of agriculture, BBOWT cuts the Meadows in the traditional hay-making season. This used to be for animals’ winter feed. Now it’s to sustain the diversity of plants and all their attendant creatures. Grass left uncut will eventually take over, pushing out less resilient species.

This is part of a process called “succession”. In the classic model grassland is followed by shrubby scrub and birch. Over time this develops into mature forest, in hypothetical truly wild circumstances inhabited by herds of large herbivores preyed on by peak carnivores such as wolves. No doubt the sequence would be rather different on land beside a flooding river, and the likelihood of a complete pre-Neolithic ecosystem developing just south of a medium-sized English city is low (and would take hundreds, maybe thousands of years). It’s strange to think that BBOWT is holding the Meadows in a kind of stasis, even as the climate, city and wildlife shift around them.

The mowing is a shocking change. The first time I saw its effect, I felt robbed of the place I’d loved over the preceding weeks. The tall plants and their colours were replaced by trimmed grass and fragments of plant tissue lying bruised on the severed stems. Few insects moved. I couldn’t understand what had happened. Now I have more of an idea, but my enjoyment of the summer growth is always tempered by the knowledge that it will all be cut down.

After summer’s felling, the Meadows are among the first places to feel the onset of cold. In hot August afternoons and Indian summers great pillars of cool air rise out of the green. Wet chill coats the hairs on my arms and swallows string along the telephone cables overhead. The mud thickens and deepens. It’s the same as the year before, and before that, but every time it feels as though the cycle has stopped at zero.