As Jak and Ped turn a corner, and cycle down the hill into the village of Beckley, Otmoor is laid out before them – a patchwork of brown fields, green and yellow hedgerows, and occasional pools of water reflecting the summer sun beneath a wide blue sky.
Otmoor is a wetland nearly four miles north of Barton, on the north-east edge of Oxford, and to the south and west of the M40 motorway. There are seven villages dotted around Otmoor: Horton cum Studley, Murcott, Fencott, Oddington, Noke, Beckley and the largest, Charlton-on-Otmoor, whose medieval Church of St Mary the Virgin dominates the skyline for miles around.
The UK government had originally wanted to drive the motorway across Otmoor. To prevent the destruction of this nature-rich landscape, individual campaigners bought up tiny plots of land, 3000 in total, to complicate and delay the planning process. They renamed this part of Otmoor ‘Alice’s Field’ as the gridlike appearance of the field, divided into small squares of land, was said to have inspired Lewis Carroll’s depiction of a giant chessboard in Alice Through the Looking Glass.
The government chose an alternative, less contested, route for the motorway.
But the division of the land into fields, the squares on the chessboard, was a consequence of enclosures started in the early nineteenth century by the rich and powerful Duke of Marlborough despite vociferous and occasionally violent opposition from villagers. Until then, since medieval times, Otmoor had been common land used by villagers as grazing for their animals.
The local communities resisted enclosures for a number of years, and faced brutal measures as a consequence. In 1830 they removed the fences that surrounded the enclosed areas, only to be attacked by armed yeomanry on horseback and forty-four villagers were carted off to Oxford Gaol. But the people in Oxford, many of whom were in town for the annual St Giles Fair, overpowered the yeomanry and set the villagers free with cries of “Otmoor forever!”
Nonetheless, as so often, power and wealth prevailed over people’s needs and the villagers’ common land was transformed into more profitable, for its new owners, pieces of privately owned land.
Jak and Ped cycle down a narrow lane towards a car park at the entrance to what is now a nature reserve. The fences are mostly gone and banks between large open fields serve as paths.
“Leave them here,” suggests Jak as they push their bikes through a creaky old gate, “can lock them to the post. Easier on foot after this.”
The path is hard and uneven, boot prints left in mud have dried out and baked in the sun. Ped watches where he puts his feet. Jak scans the neighbouring field for wildlife.
A large patch of bare earth – what had been a pool of water during the winter – is ringed by brown grass. Flies buzz, looking for fresh cattle shit to lay their eggs. But there are no animals in the field today.
They walk, across a wooden footbridge over a ditch, and along a high bank extending for a straight mile – a hedgerow of hawthorn, white May flowers long fallen away, lines the side by the ditch, and on the other a great low plain extends to a flat horizon punctuated by the distant, and somewhat fuzzy, tower of St Mary’s.
Jak looks out over the plain, “bit hazy today, you can feel it in the air down here as well. Was hoping to see hobbies hunting for insects but nothing’s about.”
Ped stands next to her, enjoying the sun on his face and saying nothing.
They continue along the bank and then turn right along another for half a mile to a corner with a wooden bird watching hide. It is empty. Jak lifts a shutter, turns the fastening above it to hold it in place and sits on the bench, binoculars peering through the letterbox shaped gap.
“Where did you get your binoculars?” asks Ped.
“Charity shop. Left one is a bit scratched but apart from that pretty good, not too old. Can’t afford new bins.”
“Which shop?”
“Oh, I can’t remember. Heart Foundation maybe? I don’t know. Somewhere on Cowley Road, I think. They’re better than the ones in Cowley Centre.”
“More expensive,” points out Ped.
“Well yeah, I get clothes and that from Cowley Centre but they don’t have things like bins so much. Or books.”
“Books,” laughs Ped, “do you read books?”
“Bird books, yeah, from charity shops. Got an app to ID song but if you can see a bird that you don’t know what it’s called, it’s quicker to find it in a book.”
“Have you got a book?”
“Yeah, here,” Jak pulls a small, thick book, with a photo of a male bullfinch on its cover, from her bag and hands it to Ped.
“Nice,” he leafs through it, “I like the pictures. They look smart. You know, I really really like birds. They look great and they sound great and I love it when they’re flying over me, like the kites I mean or seagulls, they soar up and up just like it’s the easiest thing ever. But I can never remember their names. This place is amazing!”
They watch a shallow but wide pool ringed by reeds. A bird, orange head fringed by black spiky feathers, sits on the surface. Suddenly it dives down and remerges seconds later a few yards away with a tiny fish in its dagger like bill.
“Is that a kingfisher?”
“No, a grebe,” Jak hands Ped the binoculars, “kingfishers dive from a perch next to the water, grebes from actually on the water. Like tufted ducks or cormorants.”
“Ah, it’s cool. Like a little punk!”
“Yeah, they’re cool.”
The pool is quiet. A group of young male mallards drift rather than swim past, quacking among themselves – a teenage gang looking for something to do. In the distance, an adult coot attacks a small, bedraggled baby coot – lifting itself up in the water and pecking at its victim’s head.
Ped is shocked, “why’s it attacking that poor little thing?”
“Well, coz coots kill their own chicks if there’s not enough to eat,” explains Jak as if it was something everyone knew.
Ped glances at her anxiously and decides not to ask anymore questions for a bit.
The afternoon drifts by uneventfully on Otmoor. Jak points out a redshank on a small mudbank and a little egret, slim white silhouette against the blue sky, flying over. Ped nods along appreciatively.
As the sun dips below hedgerows and the sky colours and darkens, an evening dew rises and evaporates to form a roiling mist just above the ground – a warm summer mist thick with the smell of decomposition. The May petals and drowned flies and baby birds that drifted to the bottom of pools, and rotted in warm, damp earth before the water receded, are released into the air.
Jak and Ped trudge along the banks through the mist, their thoughts muffled, back to their bikes.
Ped makes a few attempts to start a conversation about something other than birds: “have you ever driven a tractor?”, “did you go to the circus at South Park? My sister wanted to take her kids but it was too expensive,” and “why’s the workstation 2 foreman such a loser?” But Jak ignores him apart from a slight nod in response to the last question.
The climb out of Beckley is arduous but takes them back into clear air. Sweat pours down their faces and arms onto the handlebars. But once over the crest of the hill, it is easy going.
Jak feels at ease in the open, her worries and uncertainties released by wide skies and nature doing its own thing regardless of human wishes. And Ped has been better company, asking questions that make her feel knowledgeable, than she had expected.
“Let’s go past Sydlings Copse and through the fields.”
The rookery in Sydlings Copse is in full cry, a rough but vibrant hubbub of sound as adult birds greet their young, communicate with neighbours and alert them to any threats from the ground below or the sky above. A pheasant shrieks and erupts from a large tuft of grass as a fox patrols, not hunting yet, just observing strangers on the edge of its field.
Jak and Ped push their bikes down a narrow path, through overgrown but wilting brown blades of grass that droop and tremble in a rising wind. In front of them is a deep red sky, with heavy clouds building in the south-west.
At the foot of the hill, Barton’s neat, brick-built houses are arranged in crescents and cul-de-sacs. Beyond, the John Radcliffe Hospital rises – a great citadel, soaked in pink dusk light, lording it over the Northway highrise and the darkened sprawl of Marston. Central Oxford glows in the distance, its orange streetlights all the brighter for the shadow of clouds.
To Ped, it is a romantic scene: sky the colour of Valentine’s cards. And soon they will be riding into it. The coming rain, a reason to huddle together. He reaches out for Jak’s hand.
She pulls back from him.
‘Oh Tabs, I wish I could show you this. Oxford looks so tiny. And the sky is so big.
‘Those clouds, what are they called – cumulonimbus? Look at them, they’re huge. Like mountains, dark red mountains full of fire. Or blood. Or, I don’t know, something.
‘The wind’s picking up, anyway.
‘And those rooks are getting really upset. Just listen to them shouting now. They’re smart. They know something’s up, Tabs. I wonder what they’re saying to each other, some kinda warning? What is it? Maybe just ‘take cover’.’
She climbs onto her bike and gestures for Ped to do the same, “looks like rain at last. We better get ourselves down to Barton and then back to our homes before it really tips down.”