MEADOWS IN DANGER

A century ago you could have walked from Lechlade to Oxford through hay meadows teeming with insects feeding on plants with common names like sneezewort, pepper saxifrage, doddery dicks, crested dog’s tail, lady’s bedstraw, eggs and bacon, jack-go-to-bed-by-noon, and devils-bit scabious, but now Long Mead and Swinford are two of the very few sites where you can enjoy a close encounter with one of the most botanically biodiverse habitats in the UK.

Many of these meadows are over 1000 years old and they still provide their original function in 21st century agriculture. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a habitat that ticks more boxes on the list of ‘ecosystem services’ - food, flood mitigation, carbon capture, water filtration, and delight - than these ancient floodplain meadows,

This habitat is now so rare that if it were an animal, it would be on the red-ist of red lists and there would be coachloads of tourists lining up to admire and photograph one of the last ones in the wild. Their continuing loss, however, will appear on no ledger and ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ will ensure that in a few generations the tragedy of the loss will be forgotten. Locally, Eynsham's Thames valley Wildflower Meadow Restoration Project has been created specifically to ensure that this does not happen, by recreating wildflower meadows and create ‘bigger, better, more joined up’ landscape of these jewels of our heritage.

Long Mead and Swinford Meadows are now under threat from Botley West.

The latest version of maps released by the Developer, reveal plans to dig a trench through one or both of Long Mead and Swinford Meadows to enable their cables to cross the Thames near Eynsham. The land, undisturbed for 1000 years, would never fully recover. These meadows are part of only 4 square miles of original floodplain hay meadow left in the UK and must be protected. Long Mead meadow featured in a film produced for Cop26 and it would be a huge embarrassment for the government if this important floodplain was destroyed on their watch.

Above is a small sample of the artwork and beautiful wildflowers sketched and photographed in Swinford Meadows in July to record the biodiversity which now exists but could be lost forever.

Below is a video called “Working with Nature: Rivers & Coast”. It was shown at the Cop26 conference (United Nations climate convention) hosted by the UK in 2021 and describes how dedicated groups of people around the UK are working with nature to build resilience to climate change, protect biodiversity, support livelihoods, and slow warming. The first 10 minutes 50 seconds are all about Long Mead meadow and it’s contribution to this solution.

This film was created by filmmaker, Matthew Mullholland, working in collaboration with the Nature-based Solutions Initiative at the University of Oxford.