Mornings and After: Port Meadow

There are other places I love at least equally, but I’ve rarely seen the sun rise over them. When I was at university I followed each all-night “essay crisis” in summer term by a ceremonial handing in at the college Lodge, and then a walk out across Woodstock Road, down Observatory Street, Walton Street, Walton Well Road in their murky streetlight-pre-dawn dress, over the railway bridge and eventually onto the stumbly, stony track that leads across the bottom of the green spread, and to the river. Then over the wooden bridge, rattling the slats underfoot, and turn to face the way I’d come to watch the sky change colour. As I sat on the concrete the cold would catch up with me, moving through buttocks, kidneys and spine, and the geese would gather, expecting bread.

Quite often I would get there after the day had already begun. The sun would have gone through its transformations and be consolidating its colour in the sky. Or, more frequently (this being Oxford) mist would sprawl in the air, thickest by the water, making the grass of the Meadow and the line of the trees no more than crayon-gestures. Or I would get there too early and sit by the Thames’ reflections of the city’s electric light, trying to warm my numb fingers and wishing that cafes opened earlier. But when I caught a good dawn I’d reel back to bed absurdly happy.

Greens and blues are what I remember most clearly, and being able to smell the cold. The sound of the river and the waterfowl, and traffic noise on the ring road. Suddenly I’d be conscious of the colours changing, warmer to the eye, the green of the Meadow drenched in a gold that hardened and dulled as the sun moved higher in the sky. The first joggers and cyclists would appear, and dogs’ paws tap on the gravelly towpath. This would be my time to leave, achy with the chill and moving blearily. As I made my way towards the tarmac I’d keep glancing left, over the humps and bumps closest to me, towards the Meadow proper, and Wolvercote Common beyond, the expanse grass-green, mud-black, water-white.

The view hasn’t changed much in the last 15 years or more. In recent times there seems to have been more water cover (it’s a huge flood meadow), and university accommodation blocks have sprouted to the south. But the monochrome horses and cows still graze the turf, and pied wagtails scrap on the banks of the flood lake. At the far end of the green space – assuming there’s no mist – blocky shapes mark the beginning of Wolvercote. This is how it’s been for as long as I’ve known the place.

If you believe the information boards, 15 years is close to nothing against the 4,000 in which no plough has broken the turf. The land is good grazing, but too soggy for reliable crops, or for much building. This is an amazing length of time for one piece of ground to have stayed the same, and on heat-haze days, or in winter sunsets it’s easy to believe that it’s true, that in the distortions of light you really can look into an ancient landscape. In the long bodies of the grazers you might believe you’re seeing wild creatures moving in their natural habitat. It’s something I can’t help looking for every time I step onto the Meadow. I like to sit at the bottom end of the flood-lake, where the ground rises slightly, and stare out into “the past”.

And this great age connotes a sense of being in touch with a wilder kind of nature, that wolves might come stalking down from Wolvercote. It is true that herds of herbivores are thought to have been a key part of the pre-Neolithic landscape. It’s also true that Port Meadow is one of only three or four UK sites where the creeping marshwort survives.

Other threads from the past illustrate the impossibility of this view into prehistory. An Iron Age “fort” (probably more of an embanked homestead) site on the eastern edge of the present Meadow – someone must have made a living from this land. In the eighteenth century there was a racecourse up towards Wolvercote – some of its infrastructure still sticks out of the ground. It is also one of the few places left in which commoners’ rights still persist, hence the cows and horses. How their grazing is managed has a strong influence on what plants have live on the Meadow.

So while I can stand and look out through the flocks of dunlin on winter floodwater, persuading myself that I can see back towards the beginning of human intervention here, I can’t. Even the most undisturbed land still bears the marks of its use.

But even though I know this, while I’m there I can choose to ignore it. I can even forget what I think about Charles I, or saints’ tales, and sympathetically imagine the defeated king escaping across the Meadow from besieged Oxford, or St Frideswide taking the same route almost a millennium earlier. Or I can try to switch off the author in my brain and look up at the sky.

It’s often full of birds. In winter it’s waterfowl, often in transit. They crowd in thousands, each bird an image of its neighbours, all colours and movement shared. In summer it’s swallows and martins. I can’t help seeing their brake-swerves and grass-skims as endlessly daring, as though they were the dormant thrill-seeker within me. Of course, to them it’s almost certainly something else entirely.

If there are no birds, and sometimes even if there are, I look up at the sky. Port Meadow has a big sky. So far it goes that whole countries must exist between the treetops and the end of earth, between the roofs visible and the source of the white towers of cloud overhead.

But I’m here with my daughter, and I’ve promised her “tea and cake” at the Jericho Café (and my wife likes that they have eight kinds of flapjack to choose from), and it’s back to the grassy world with the river and its sailboats moving in the background. These days my last look across Port Meadow, before we reach the railway bridge, is a grabbed one, looking back before looking ahead. It always makes me feel that I have not had enough of this place.