We cross South Park when it is already getting dark. It’s been raining for the past two days, but tonight the view is clear and stars are beginning to pockmark the sky, presided by a lamp of a moon.

The grass is still wet, soggy, puddled; if you stand quietly enough, you can hear the water trickling downhill in a series of miniature channels over which our boots slip and sludge clumsily.

At the top of the park we sit beneath a Sycamore overlooking the city. Only a few spires remain illuminated now, shedding light on weathered rock, alone; exposed.

Soon we’re off again, walking along dimly illuminated streets, passing the dilapidated Thistle and Crown. We cross the ring-road and soon the real climb begins. The road loses its pavement and the banks become steeper and lined with tall trees. Eventually the walker is exposed to a long, open ridge.

Few students make the trek out to Shotover, and those who do make it all the way out of town usually do so by means other than their own feet. And
yet, there’s something more fulfilling about leaving one’s doorstep, crossing the blurred boundary out of town and into a silent environment, before
returning by one’s own feet.

Shotover is one of Oxford’s truly liminal spaces – open, forested, liberating,
naked – yet still clearly undetached from the biref glimpses of Botley’s gridded housing. Shotover is part of a private estate, and the subject of a peculiar Daily Mail article from 2010 entitled, “Queen’s friend calls in police after his
estate is overrun with people having outdoor sex”.

On a warm sunny day, the sloping field to the South is fi lled with young children playing ball, and families barbecuing or sitting on rugs. On one such unique day, when sun, breeze and even weekend accomplished a stunning afternoon, I was offered chicken wings and a drink by a friendly Albanian couple before I set off to discover the endless minute valleys, grassy clearings and woods.

These small woods are surprising in their variety; one moment one is surrounded by tall oaks, the next by ash, birch, hazel or willow. All these trees, and the rich wildlife which surrounds them, is meticulously noted, recorded and published in leaflets by Shotover Wildlife, a small organisation run by local volunteers.

But right now it’s not sunny: it’s nearing midnight, and we’re not so concerned with the names of the trees or the wealth of the wildlife around us. Sitting in a comfortable oak, we look down into the valley to Botley, the lights a sea of gloworms.

Places are not the same by night. They are transformed. Shapes and forms take on different sizes, colours and shades. Perspective becomes
blurred, sounds sharper. When I first began going on nightwalks, making short outings to Addison’s walk, I was often scared, on edge, even in the safe surroundings of college walls. But soon I came to endorse the dark; I enjoyed noting the differences, appreciating my newly darkened, muted surroundings as a different place entirely.

I soon became fascinated by the shape of branches against the dimmed sky; sinewy black ink rivulets upon a pastel shade.

We walk down from Shotover and cross the bypass; the lights on the street glare and confuse our eyes, and I wish I had slept there.

The water meadow goes through an incredible transformation at this time of the year. Having spent months submerged by the rising waters, like a smaller version, isolated and walled, of Port Meadow, the grass blooms with purple Snakeshead fritillaries around the beginning of April. Such a display of purple bloom is not common – there are few places where the purple petals can be seen growing in such numbers, despite being recorded in this particular spot since 1785. 

These delicate, spotty, dangling violet cups, however, do not last long, and briefly the colour in the meadow recedes to a dull green for a few weeks.
Nevertheless, the yellow sparkle of wild buttercups slowly starts to adorn the field. The flowers rise at first tentatively out of the tall grass, forming isolated pockets of bright colour, before fully asserting themselves as a powdery sea of yellow.

In typical Oxford fashion, intruders are most unwelcome in this sacred patch of yellow and green, an untouched holy land into which very few are nevertheless not tempted to trample once or twice during their degrees.
“Under no circumstances should any students enter the Deer park. We will treat this extremely seriously.”

Permeated for half the year by the threatening bark of male deer, the field is suitably empty for the more adventurous undergraduates to trample into by the time it gives over to a yellow jungle.

After dark, the endeavour feels most like an adventure. On a warm night, “the warmest night of the decade”, we jump over the metal bars into the thick grass and walk across the field tentatively, listening to the scratching of a delicate claw on rough bark, or the flow of the Isis/Cherwell/Thames, ever reminiscent of the meadow’s purpose – to be covered by a shallow veil of water.

Walking back home on a summer’s night, one often bumps in to a group of tramps lighting a fire across the river – metres away – in a bizarre, tangible reminder of the Bubble.

But perhaps on a glazed summer’s day the magical reality of this most exceptional spot can be felt at its best. Pleasantly woozy, dazed by the brilliant Trinity sun, a frolic, a skip and a jump through this thickly threaded yellow tapestry is an experience like no other.

It’s a moment of blind delight, of timelessness in the face of the crunching passage of time; soon, the deer will be back, munching away at the tough grass; soon the waters will be back again, reflecting the tower in its shallow depths at night; soon the fritillaries will be emerging, to begin the cycle again, and the final stretch of academic entitlement will be laid bare.

But not now. At this specific fragment of time, delicate and fleeting as a sheet of glass, the yellow powder, flying from the buttercups as we run and dance and chase, has gathered on my trousers, giving them a golden wash. I brush off the fairy powder as we climb out into the open again, back into the (semi) real world.

Port Meadow looks different before a swim. It is colder and wilder, perhaps because your whole consciousness is focussed on the river. The river is what frames the meadow – it is the point at which the land stops being Our Oxford and starts being “the wilderness” leading on to Binsey and the woods beyond. If you look at a map, you can see the way that the Cherwell encloses the city, creating pockets of land with names and personalities – meadows, allotments, and parks.

Just south of Port Meadow is an area of land called Fiddler’s Island, where the Medley Bridge leads to a fork in the river which separates the Thames from Castle Mill Stream and the Oxford Canal. Here you find an area of water which was authorised for public bathing in 1852. There are other places to swim in the city – Parson’s Pleasure, Tumbling Bay. Worcester Lake has been done by many, as has Uni Parks and the divided stream of the Cherwell under Magdalen Bridge. But there is something about Port Meadow, its simultaneous closeness and removed-ness from the city, which makes it a good place to start for prospective wild swimmers.

At college, we bundle up like children going to the seaside – towels, jumpers, flip-flops. But it’s only April, and it’s a grey day, and there’s an air of trepidation as well as excitement in the walk through Jericho and over the railway bridge. We have done this in January, February and March, in three jumpers and a coat, when the river was flooded and wild and even the ducks sat on the canal boats fearing the strength of the current. The water was a whirlpool – too dangerous to jump in, we lowered ourselves down, holding onto the bridge to avoid being swept downstream. This time though, we brace ourselves and jump, eyes closed and breath held.

There’s a wonderful feeling of freedom that comes from being in the water, especially here where it is deep enough to kick your legs out without touching river-bed. It’s not like swimming in the sea, where you feel like the waves are washing you clean. The water of the Thames is brown and murky, and we emerge with mud and scratches on our bodies from climbing out over the bank, skin raw and pink and hastily covered in towels and clothing. This is not a baptism in the sense of feeling cleansed and refreshed by the water – in fact you feel like you need a long bath and bed as soon as possible.

But it is a rite. This is how you become part of the Meadow – reclaim it as something human. Not in the way that destroys trees, and erects housing complexes and roads, but in the way that makes humans an intrinsic part of the landscape, and it a part of us. Swimming in summer, when the Meadow is buzzing with people, this feeling is more acute. People line up to watch the crazy students playing on the rope swing on Fiddler’s Island.
The river is a part of the personality of Oxford, where rowing and punting and crossing the Magdalen bridge are part of the daily fabric of life. These things are also what separate us from real life. This is what you feel when swimming – that nowhere else could being in the river mean quite so much.

Wytham Woods – pronounced “white-am” – lie at the northwestern edge of Port Meadow, on a hill which lies vigilant beyond the endless field.

The hand-drawn map supplied to passholders in itself fuels the natural imagination: Rough Common, Healing’s Copse, The Singing Way, My Lady’s Seat, Five Sisters, and Marley Wood are all pencilled in among the criss-crossing lines denoting woods, paths and fields.

These names all suggest familiarity and association; they hold in their very names decades of human exploration and attachment.

Wytham Woods, a Site of Special Scientific Interest, are used by the University for biological research, and are meant to be one of the most studied areas of woodland in the world.

It’s my birthday. We walk up to Wytham on a muted March evening, which wind and grey clouds threaten to damped. We pass Godstow Nunnery and make the slow climb to the wooden gates leading officially into the woods.
It’s unusual being in a wood which is also a scientific laboratory. The area covered by the protected forest is only a few square miles – enough for a refreshing stroll but not quite sufficient to challenge muscles or breath.

All around, birdhuts, used to monitor the great tit population, hang from old oaks, whilst in the open fields, nets are drawn over small patches of grass to measure their growth. Metal scaffolding stands skeleton-like among the upper branches of old trees.

There’s something comforting about being surrounded by trees. The perspective of looking through rows and rows of vertical boughs, sometimes, in the distance, matching up in a straight line, or otherwise opening up, allowing the eye to reach further, is cleansing.

In such a forest there is of course much more than visual pleasure; there’s the sound of wind bending and creaking age-old timber, or the whiff of damp leaves, the smell of air, damp, imbued with life.

The forest, as we walk along the Singing Way to the Great Wood, is quiet. All around us there is flourishing life, and yet a form of life which exists on a completely different timescale to the one we know. No wonder that forests have served as a source of contemplation and inspiration for so many centuries.

As we enter the Great Wood, the large trunks of oak and ash make way for younger sprouts of hazel. The path winds down into a small valley and a light rattling sound fills our ears. The sound rises and falls like an eerie natural composition. At first wonderfully inexplicable, we soon discover that the sound comes from thousands of small metal circles nailed on to individual trees to keep track of their growth and position. A deer crosses the increasingly winding path, takes a brief, striking look back, before springing away.

It’s getting dark now, and wearied limbs are calling for a much-needed rest. Soon boots hit tarmac again, and eventually we’re crossing Port Meadow’s deep mud, just as the rain, previously threatening and now lashing, drenches us to the bone.

In his recent book of poetry inspired by Port Meadow, David Atwooll allows that “It’s a peopled place / of course: painted landscapes often need, somewhere, a red smudge”.

One would struggle to describe Port Meadow as a “wild” place. Flanked by a busy railway track and surrounded on all sides by the physical presence of city life, Port Meadow is hardly a remote natural spot; it acts rather as an oasis close to Oxford’s centre. But perhaps it’s this human element that adds to its sense of place.

Most students who feel the pull of natural places have soon exhausted the charm and tidiness of their college gardens or Christ Church meadows; often their first destination in search of a slightly more rugged, remote place is this seemingly endless expanse of grass and mud.

Port Meadow is steeped in myth; it’s the unploughed landscape, the land earned from resisting the Danes, a sacred spot where the Freemen graze their cattle.

It is, nevertheless, a changing landscape, an idea which is captured in Atwooll’s poetry, collected in his pamphlet Ground Work. Illustrated by Andrew Walton, the collection explores the various phases of Port Meadow, from “veiled in mist and frost” to an “archipelago of pools” as the flood which mantles the flat land for months on end begins to recede.

Ash, willow and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Binsey Poplars (“All felled, felled, are all felled”) stand scatterred along along the grassy edges.

To the West, the Isis soaks its banks on the meadow, tempting an intrepid swimmer to be carried gently down the water by a strong current as a sunny day comes to its lengthy close. 

Just across the thick grass, to the East, lies Burgess Field, a small forest which has regenerated on a reclaimed landfill site. The young forest stands immutable as a poignant reminder of the visitor’s transcience.

The meadow is alive. Birds rise in throngs or poke about alone — herons picking the puddled grass for small fish, dunlin with their long arched beaks, as well as geese, gulls, godwits, warblers and the occasional glide of a peregrine or a buzzard.

Horses and cattle share the flat, undulating land at alternating times of the year, allowed only when the creeping waters of the flood don’t leave them stranded.

Port meadow: a meadow turned habour by the winter floods; a field made jolly on sunny afternoons by sweet wine. At night, across the water, Wolvercote flickers in the distance like a seaside town.

And yet it remains, in Atwooll’s words, a “peopled place”. For this landscape is not all sunny walks and natural beauty. Open spaces like this have always attracted questionable activities after nightfall. Such sites are as often places of enjoyment and pleasure as they are sites of reflection, sorrow, despair.

Only the other day, a pink princess outfit, with white frills on the shoulders, glinting glitter, hung from a hawthorn on the edge of the railway track. As a train rushed past, the wind lifted the dress and it blew listelessly, light, to and fro on the tree’s side. The remnants of a moment, opaque, unfinished, vanished.