#38: Port Meadow

The wide skies, geese, horses and meandering river in Port Meadow and the adjoining Wolvercote Common, are one of the delights of Oxford. The houses on the edge of the Common, with their makeshift walkways over the ditch surrounding them, still evoke a long-gone time when this part of the city was much less gentrified. Then the mini-pond on one corner, now home to ducks and gulls, might have been a noisome puddle to be avoided by those wanting to pass through or graze the horses on this common land (which Wolvercote ‘villagers’ can still do). 

The allotments in the middle are unusual in not being sandwiched between housing. 

Port Meadow is not only a beautiful space but a site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), partly because it is said not to have been ploughed for at least 4000 years. A sign on the edge encourages people to ‘Protect Cherish Preserve.’

'Protect Cherish Preserve'

But of course Port Meadow is in no way virgin land. It was cleared of trees long before countryside protection was ever thought of and at a time when every place would be an SSSI for us now, if we could only bring them back.

I wonder if saplings are regularly uprooted to prevent trees covering it again. In today’s bureaucratic parlance, whether it is ‘managed’. Such treatment would I imagine be strongly criticised by rewilders such as George Monbiot and Ben Goldsmith, the latter recently tweeting that those who had helped to secure World Heritage Status for the Lake District were ‘dinosaurs’ for wanting to keep it in its current, tree-shorn, sheep-nibbled state. He said that the Lake District looks as if it had had chemotherapy, and looking at photos of bald Cumbrian mountainsides it is difficult to disagree.

The idea of ‘managing’ nature indeed seems strange to me, since the planet managed itself for billions of years before man involved, much more successfully than we have done. We are the result of those biological processes, not master of them. But of course some reserves are managed now to protect them, for example to conserve biodiversity.

A true wilderness near Oxford city centre is an appealing prospect – until a tree falls on someone and the council is sued. Another way of viewing the space is to appreciate what it tells us about humans, history and use as well as for its intrinsic beauty. I found this approach appealing in the book Millstone Grit by Glyn Hughes, in which he appreciates the denuded beauty of the Peaks, including sites of factories, rebellions and walks. So we can cherish Port Meadow as a delightful – even ‘managed’ – space, as the geese honk and horses come to the water to drink, then gallop quickly away.