Fobney Marsh

Set back from the road and really only visible from an out of the way footpath Fobney marsh is quite an amazing wetland.

It’s about a mile from the town centre, and it’s part of a big complex of old meadows sandwiched between the canal and the Holy Brook. It’s the lowest lying part of the meadows and the last to dry out, only rarely doing so.

Up until a year or so ago there was a herd of cows who browsed and trampled the marsh, but they were taken off and there aren’t any now.

The loss of grazing has lead to the marsh becoming overgrown, so it was invisible from the path, and the only way to see it was to make your way through the vegetation but in the summer it would have meant disturbing the breeding birds so it wasn’t until September we got to have a look at it. Me and a couple of friends cut and trampled a small area on the edge of the open water. A couple of days later we went back, the area we’d cut was attracting a lot of birds. We went back a couple of weeks later and did a bit more and the result was even more surprising. An Avocet arrived, the first one in Reading for many years.

Amazingly a few days after it flew off another one appeared and it thwarted our plan to trample some more of the marsh so we moved to another area and trampled that. Again that started to attract birds but the weather had been so mild that the vegetation kept growing back.

So we hatched a plan to get lots of people down the make a lovely muddy mess. That combined with some very cold weather should see the habitat become much more suitable for birds to feed.

In the meantime people started to use the path. The council were eventually persuaded to clear it so people could walk along it.

Thames Water fixed a leak which had been flooding the path from Fobney lock and soon the numbers of visitors to the meadows increased. In fact people came from quite a way partly as a result of the reports of Avocets Barn owls Peregrine falcons and much more

A sign was made to let people know what to look out for and some more signs pointing the way for people who had never been before.

So after many years of sitting around talking about doing stuff, but not actually getting anything done, we’ve suddenly started to make some real progress.