Low Land (2): Iffley Meadows, South Oxford

I don’t often do a full circuit of the Meadows. Most often, my route is down the riverbank with my family to the Isis pub/café. My daughter loves this, cycling along Donnington Bridge Road and the towpath at speeds that put my sprinting to the test. When we get to the Isis I have to follow her in a game of “hop rock” along some concrete blocks. To her, all Oxford is a playground. She climbs steps to locked doors, runs along the tops of walls, dances round patterns laid in tiles on the ground. She likes to spot grotesques and gargoyles high on the walls of colleges.

She’s not the only person to adapt the city’s shape to her free-ranging will, as I was reminded one winter-crushing-spring day. I was making a deliberate attempt to explore parts of the Meadows I didn’t know. Cold water seemed to be everywhere.

The public footpaths on the Meadows are unadventurous. Both drift east to the river’s main channel. A permissive path strikes west just south of the first line of trees you approach from Weirs Lane or Donnington Bridge. This heads south on the bank of the river’s lesser arm. I followed it, conscious of jackdaws and magpies, mud, and the washed-out green of winter plants.

Sometimes there are narrowboats moored there, but on this afternoon there was nothing you could fix a single human presence to, only litter in the water, and snarled among the reeds – relics of the recent floods. Other relics were the flattened vegetation, still patterned with the silt the current had left. I suppose you could add to that the grind of traffic on the nearby roads. I got my feet deep in mud, I slipped and held onto the bare branches of a horse chestnut tree.

This path eventually reaches a kissing gate, where it, like the others, heads towards a river, this time across a field tufted with heads of grass and slippy with moisture. But to the right there’s a route that stays close to the river’s western branch. I took this one. You have to push between shrubs and stands of reeds. Soon I was at the very edge of the water, outside the Meadow’s hard boundary of steel fence. Still, I was on a path that went straight on towards the ring road bridge.

The gully of mud between the fence and the reeds (don’t imagine them standing up, but prone – think of the trees surrounding the 1908 Tunguska explosion) showed that this path was well used – to an extent. There were many footprints, boots and dog paws, but all had been softened by the rain of the previous few days. The only creature that had passed through since then was a muntjac – perhaps related to those I‘d seen by the river earlier in the winter. Its marks were small and sharp.

By contrast mine slipped and ground in the mud. As best I could I jumped from tussock to tussock of reed, sometimes sensing the looseness of them on the edge of the river. Often I hung on to the branches of willows or the trunks of saplings to swing across wide spaces of soaking earth between the battered plants.

This path was all margin. On one side the wire fence that marked the Meadows’ edge. The Meadows lay flat and swept by the wind as far as the trees and official riverside path by the Thames’ main route. On the other the backwater, not placid but hurtling on, leaving frantic eddies around low-slung branches. A line of plastic bags in the tees and bunches of reed marked the high level it had reached during the winter floods. Nothing about it was maintained – the mud was only kept bare by repeated use.

I wondered about the people who knew about and went along this route. Dog walkers, the homeless who sometimes pitched tents at the northern end of the Meadows, people who moored their boats in the quiet out of the main channel? None of them were here today, and as I struggled on I could see why.

It was a strange interlude, this slip and cling through old footprints. The river’s speed was not matched by its sound, and there were no birds to make even the wintriest noise. Above all was the voice of the ring road, whose bridge loomed over me as I reached the turn in the fence, where it followed the line of the road at the bottom of its embankment.

My original aim in coming here had been to get down to the far end of Iffley Meadows, and this was a good place to have a look. I turned with the fence, but soon found that the floods here had not yet ended – the Meadows were still doing their old job of holding the water to themselves. I quickly found myself more than ankle deep in a very, very cold lake that swilled about under a layer of rank grass and reeds. I swiftly abandoned my plan. A man walking on the path up by the ring road looked curiously down at my damp flailing towards dry land.

This would have been frustrating, except that the marginal path I had been following before went further on. One reason for its existence was clear – it offered a quick route up or down from the ring road for those unwilling (for whatever reason) to take the main route into the Meadows or beyond. A fork in the path led up through the shrubby tree cover to where the vehicles rushed by. It too was slippy and sliding feet had left trails in the grass below it.

The other fork went straight on, under the bridge. This construction has a trapezoid shape, the river forming its shorter edge and the great concrete base of the road the longer. Structurally it extends deep into the height of the embankment, but visually the rough grass stops abruptly around the concrete, almost as though an ordinary dog had opened its mouth to reveal a metal frame, and not teeth and gums. The sound of the road telescoped as I made my way carefully to the river’s lip, a strip of concrete little more than my foot’s breadth. The water underneath was black, and white where the high clouds’ light still made its way through.

Often there’s something strangely beautiful about brute concrete engineering like this – it might be the audacity of the construction’s dominance of its environment; it might be the decay and neglect that overlays – water, lichen, wind damage. Even this bridge’s close neighbour, the span over the main branch of the Thames, acts as a nesting site for swallows, a courting place for pigeons, and hosts the occasional brilliance of polemical graffitists. But this bridge has none of that. Decay is not possible, because it carries a road, that heartstring of infrastructure. Its design reflects its job – carry, and don’t be seen much – which it does perfectly.

Meanwhile the path under it becomes a tricky line between deep water and some kind of mud ballast that creates a 45 degree slope from the concrete by the river back into the darkness under the road’s body. This must have been dredged from the sea, to judge by the shells crusted in it. In the low light it shines unevenly, creepily reminiscent of the organic structures of the Alien films.

Apart from all this, the act of walking under there is pretty difficult. A stumble means either a fall into the quick river, or an ugly scramble in semi-dried seabed – probably followed by a fall into the river. I took my steps carefully until, back in the light, a rise in the grass offered escape from proximity to a dunking. I scrambled up, relieved to hear the traffic sound unaltered by the confines of the space under the bridge.

One path led straight on along the river, right into thickets of nettles, whose leaves had been shrivelled into nightmare bat wings by the cold, their stems, almost parallel, gradually shaded into a grim cross-hatching as the distance increased,. Trees, young and old, also crowded on the bank, as though looking down on a disaster. In a way they were – this didn’t look like a particularly healthy ecosystem. Nevertheless, the path went on.

Another route rose sharply up the bank or the road, between trees. I scrambled up some of the way, enough to see the cars surging along, and the litter scattered between the trunks. Unlike the route by the river, its purpose was clear enough – the same as on the other side, to give quick access to the road. Why that purpose was important just here was less clear.

The third path branched off the second, heading down from the bank to a fence. Beyond the fence was a field. Quite different from the Meadows, it was filled with rank grass and nettles, and edged with bramble. Someone had built a stile there, and the path roamed on into the flatness of the space beyond. White clouds hung overhead.

The stile was well made, but clearly cut from old bits of wood – improvised work. With the paths, it formed part of what I was tempted to call a “folk infrastructure”, unofficial, intermittently used, but useful in a way both like and unlike the engineered landscape of the road. These lines drawn in the margins were a kind of maturing of the instinct that drives my daughter to make her own playground of Oxford’s street furniture.

I leant on the fence by the stile for some time, looking out at the raggedy field and its floodmarks. I was tempted to climb over, keep going on the unofficial ways. But I had ordinary things to do, so turned back along the narrow causeway under the bridge.