Meadow Lane Nature Park and Oriel Meadow

Meadow Lane Nature Park and Oriel Meadow lie along the Thames on the south-eastern side of Donnington Bridge, down from the City of Oxford Rowing Club building and Salter’s boat yard. Like the Kidneys and Aston’s Eyot, they have different owners and different characters. Whoever may have owned and managed them when they were meadows, by the mid nineteenth century much if not all of this land had passed into the hands of the city.

The city still owns the Meadow Lane Reserve, which is a tangle of shrubs (including plenty of hawthorn), and blackberry bushes, through which a path loops down to the river and back. Oxford Conservation Volunteers call it ‘an idyllic meadow’ but concede that ‘in recent years the meadow has been allowed to scrub over, which has made survival of rarer species more difficult’. They have plans to recover more of its meadow character. The Boundary Brook, which at one point marked the eastern boundary of the city, runs through in a concrete channel.

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Meadow Lane Nature Park

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Boundary Brook – heading for the Thames

Oriel Meadow has a more complex history. Oriel first acquired a share here in 1861, when it swapped its post-enclosure holding in what’s now termed the Burgess Field, alongside Port Meadow, for a slice of the city’s land on the waterfront. This was thirty years before Christ Church bought Aston’s Eyot – but evidently colleges saw waterfront properties as attractive at this time, when organised leisure was becoming a more regular part of college life. Like Christ Church, Oriel did nothing much with its new holding. After the war, the level of the land was raised, and it was used for a while as a rubbish dump – unclear whether this was under the auspices of the city. That use had been phased out by the 1970s, when the college acquired more land alongside (though part of the field remains in other hands). At one point, the college considered developing it as a sports field, but that never came to pass.

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Oriel’s Memorial Meadow: view from the edge

In 2018, Oriel found a new use for the land as a memorial to the college’s First World War dead. To that end, it’s been planted with small trees, which, with the passage of time, will give this strip of ground a more distinctive character. It may return to use as pasture.

A nettle-strewn path runs along the edge of the field and gives views over the river.

Edited to add information about the Oxford Conservation Volunteers’ interest in Meadow Lane Nature Park. Information about the history of Oriel Meadow from Oriel College.