This latest flood is the third of this wet season. I can’t remember the water level reaching the levels it has reached 3 times in one winter. It often reaches these levels, but not every year. Sometimes it gets higher, sometimes the area stays flooded for weeks, this season it’s reached a peak, dropped and risen again and now it’s reached the peak for the third time.
So my regular trip to the marsh was off and I had to stick to drier ground. From Fobney to Southcote lock is actually a really pleasant walk.
It’s dry and above the water level and is normally very busy. I don’t often walk along it, preferring the muddy squelchy paths of the Marshes.
At Fobney lock all the sluices are open, the lock can’t flow much more water. It’s already flowing over the gates.
Fobney island is completely underwater!
The meadows on the opposite side of the canal are hardly flooded at all, even though the canal is several feet higher than the vegetation. A bonus was a pair of Ravens, there’s two sitting on the pylon chattering to each other.
I was lucky enough to find a four leafed clover by the path. I have an eye for them but I don’t think I’ve ever found one in midwinter before. Searching for them is a summer pastime
You can hear the labyrinth weir long before you see it. It’s a remarkable structure and few people pass over it without stopping.
There’s another weir of the same design in Boston manor, which you pass by without realising if you use the M4 to get into London. It’s nowhere near as spectacular though.
Although the bridge is a bit utilitarian, I’ve often wondered if it would make for an art project.
This is the start of the Coley meadows. They are all low lying. The western boundary is the railway embankment and the bridge that carries the tracks over the river. A few times in the past the canal has broken the bank here and flooded the marshes, attracting all sorts of birds. It’s very inaccessible and you will hardly ever see anyone. This could be a great place for a sluice to flood the meadows deliberately, protect the low lying parts of Reading downstream when the levels rise and create a lovely wetland.
Head a bit further west under the railway bridge and on the far side of the canal are the Southcote meadows. These are at full capacity. The water is held back by the railway embankment so the meadows here are completely flooded. There’s no additional capacity and the water flows out of these meadows into the river, the opposite of the meadows downstream. They haven’t been grazed or managed in any way for 50 years and are slowly becoming wet woodland. And they are astonishingly diverse. My favourite bird, the Whitethroat breeds here in spring, as do many more bird species.
At Milkmaids bridge you can cross the canal and walk through the meadows to Southcote but I headed up the little unmade path alongside the river. This path takes you into a wonderful wooded riverside and the complex of abandoned gravel pits further up. Sadly that too was beyond me.
This is the path, fast flowing as the water pours out of the weirpool and flows away over the path. It was too treacherous to attempt to cross it, so my walk was truncated by the water levels.
There is a path that heads south away from the river. It’s a really old track but sadly it gets no attention from the council and is difficult to use at any time of year, but now the storms have brought branches down and the water from the river has completely submerged it. It’s been like this for months.
The neighbouring fields on the south side of the canal are where much of the river water lies. Ducks move in straight away. This field was a gravel pit when I first came to live here. while they were digging it out it was a magnet for birds, and me. Then they filled it with rubble and covered it with a clay cap. They sowed a wildflower meadow on top and for a few years it was buzzing with life and colour. Now though they farmer does his best to smother the wildflowers by cutting the grass and leaving it. It’s now just rough grassland. A bit sad.
The riverside path is blessed with lots of collapsing Crack Willows. They don’t need to be very old for them to fall but where they touch the ground they will send out new roots and become a living arch. There was a beautiful one here for years that pretty effectively stopped people riding motorcycles but it also stopped the council grass cutting crew. So my complaint to the council about the path being overgrown saw them come along one summers day and cut everything down.
Now this one has fallen I’m keeping quiet about it. I trimmed it so it’s passable easily enough. I don’t want this to disappear too.
So I ended up walking back to Southcote along the well surfaced (for pedestrians) track. It’s flooded and can be an obstacle then but it’s a rare event for it to be so flooded I can’t get through in wellies.
So, refreshed from a mini adventure in the meadows, I headed home for breakfast.
Rural Reading 