Floodplain (3): Hogacre and On

On the far side of the sportsfield I'd reached at the end of the previous piece is Hogacre Common, a community-run eco park. I'm there quite often - we've planted trees, wassailed, and raked up cut grass for hay. It used to be an Oxford college sports ground, but now has a wind turbine, beehives, an orchard and an incipient wood. I love the place, but always feel that its existence is precarious despite all the dedicated work that goes into it. As the prolific, expert, trenchant naturalist Peter Marren wrote in a recent issue of British Wildlife:

"At the close of his epic television documentary Civilisation, Sir Kenneth Clark… concluded that, while he could feel hope for the future, it was hard to feel much joy. It is the other way around with me. Nature brings me joy all right, but pretending to be hopeful about its future involves mind games."

The path is so well-known to me here that the rattle of grass across my shoes is all I need to know I'm going the right way, so my eyes and ears take paths of their own.

Even if the heat of the sun reaches July levels, the light always has that slightly worn feel, as though stained by use - the page edges in a favourite book. The main sound at first is the beat of the wind turbine, a single spindly tower above what used to be a tennis court and which is now filled with things like cold frames under construction.

But soon the sound is of leaves moving, of grass being brushed through, of bees and, for the first time since the breeding season finished, birdsong. It's just robins and great tits, but after weeks in which only birds of the crow family have been audible, it's quite soothing on the ears.

The smell is the one that always comes with autumn on the floodplain, even when it's really warm - water. There's water in the earth, there's water in the air. When winter comes the Common, bounded on three sides by streams will be defined by water - the snow, possibly, the frost, the rain and floods. Maybe it's just my pessimistic disposition, or maybe it's that I love that smell, and breathe for it.

I follow the moisture to the edge of the Common, where Hinskey Stream moves slowly. Pond skaters scatter the light. Flowers hang low over the black surface, dragged lower by basking bumblebees and meadow browns recharging their flight muscles in the warmth of the sun. A little further on there is a cluster of webs under the trees. The patterns of white and silver in the crusted green draw me in - I see the gleaming backs of the predators, the moving dots of potential prey close to the ground surface. The closer I look, the more I see, the less I can name, and the less that seems to matter - it's simply life moving.

I'm not part of it. My knees hurt. I stand and go along the path, looking at the line of trees in the sun. Sometimes I think that newly green leaves are the best looking, and autumn colours are very popular. But there's also something about late-summer leaves, their fullness, the depth of their colour.

It puts me in mind of an essay by JA Burrow, "The Ricardian Poets" - the four great English writers of the reign of Richard II, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, Langland and Gower. Burrow argues that for these authors (and perhaps by extension for the society in which they lived) the best time of life was that of "high eld", a mid to late middle age in which a man (of course) had his position in the world, had unimpaired faculties, had experience, had had time to forge deep relationships, and could afford to be generous with his goods, his wisdom and his friendship. The signature sound of this stage of life is that of laughter.

My favourite example of this is Bertilak, released from his enchantment as the Green Knight by Gawain's courage. He's been bested by the young hero, he's been caught up in a plot beyond his control, but his immediate response to all this is to revert to generosity and cheer:

"And ȝe schal in þis Nwe Ȝer aȝayn to my wonez,
And we schyn reuel þe remnaunt of þis ryche fest
ful bene."

[And you shall in this New Year come again to my house
And the rest of this rich feast we'll revel together, full well]

The poet's unstated ambivalence towards the virtuous paragon from Camelot is, I think, best expressed in his polite but bitter reply. I like the ambivalence. I like the sound of "high eld". If I get there I'll be glad.

This phase of looking deeply at the things around me stays as I continue my walk. I might be thinking of medieval poetry. I might be following a well-worn path, but in some way I feel disconnected from being human because I'm paying so much attention to things that are not human.

My feet take me out of Hogacre, through barbed wire into another field, where the path is a line like a thumb trail across paint. Either side the green glitters as though moist. At a junction of routes I take one without thinking - somewhere a part of my mind is mapping a new line against familiar ones, saying "city on the right, that's the sound of the ring-road, don't get stuck by the stream." So still human really.

But my senses are open, and I pass sloe bushes, hawthorns, horse chestnuts; I try not to breathe the sickly smell of Himalayan balsam. I hear grasshoppers stridulating, and robins clearing their throats for territorial disputes. Underfoot, the earth hardens, softens; sometimes I drift into the longer grass as I choose among the assortments of paths that I cross.

Who makes them? Joggers, dog walkers. I know some homeless people camp out here. These routes are not marked on paper maps. In fact on one gate hangs a (very old) sign proclaiming "Private Land - No Trespassing."

But this is sacrificial flood land, there's nothing here to protect. Custom, the regular, familiar walk taken by the people who live nearby, has become part of a weave of lines that a drifter can follow. They are mapped in the mind of anyone who sets foot on the ages of sediment between the city and the A34.