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.