Marsh Harrier at RSPB Otmoor
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Marsh Harrier at RSPB Otmoor
Marsh Harrier at RSPB Otmoor
Marsh Harrier at RSPB Otmoor
Marsh Harrier at RSPB Otmoor
Marsh Harrier at RSPB Otmoor
Marsh Harrier at RSPB Otmoor
Marsh Harrier at RSPB Otmoor
Marsh Harrier at RSPB Otmoor
Marsh Harrier at RSPB Otmoor
Marsh Harrier at RSPB Otmoor
Marsh Harrier at RSPB Otmoor
Starlings preparing to roost at RSPB Otmoor
Next to the churchyard, the church itself hidden behind the cottage.
Decided not to play about with this image too much mainly because it's making me feel gloomy just looking at it.
Beckley felt strangely quiet and deserted like the rest of the small villages around Ot Moor, despite the edge of Oxford being not so far away.
This is the continuation of the Roman road as it enters the village, the top of the church tower just visible above the shrub in the centre of the image.
The previous image was taken crossing that field on the left, and I'm now under that huge black cloud and heading quickly into Beckley, if need be to take shelter in the church.
I didn't realise at the time that this was the Roman road that crosses the moor; behind me it becomes a lane lined with pretty cottages leading up to the church.
Apparently, although not particularly eye catching, the road is quite well preserved across the moor; 14 metres wide, raised up with drainage ditches on either side and underneath the grass still maintaining a surface of compacted limestone, cambered from the centre for drainage like modern roads. It is now a footpath/bridleway.
Not a great image - it was so dark! But I thought worth posting for the interest.
No roads cross the flat desolate expanse of Ot Moor, but a Roman Road dissects it almost in half running north to south and it survives as a footpath and low earthworks.
I'd hoped to take it to the wetland nature reserve in the centre of the moor, but an unnervingly close shave with a lightning bolt, a good soaking and pummeling with marble sized hailstones I decided it was too dangerous to be out and about in this very exposed landscape so shortened my walk. The Roman Road and footpath follows that hedgerow on the near horizon.
Climbing up to the village of Beckley that overlooks the moor, another storm just passing (I'd managed to shelter in thick woodlands) and another one on the way from the right.
There was blue sky between the storms but somehow I managed to be under cloud all day until almost in sight of the pub and my pick-up point.
Another storm coming up behind me so a retreat from the roadless moor to the shelter of the wooded hillside behind me.
The 7 remote villages that are dotted around the moor have long had a reputation for fiercely defending it and their right to graze and fish its waters, including several occasions in the early 19th century when angry villages armed with pitchforks stormed Oxford in protest of the local landowners deciding to drain and enclose the moor for their own use. They lost of course.
Ot Moor was under threat again in the 1980's when the planned extension to the M40 motorway was routed through its centre. Locals and Friends of the Earth bought a field directly in its path in the northeast of the moor and called it Alice's Meadow.
The name comes from the tale that Lewis Carroll, whilst picnicing on Beckley Hill (just behind me) overlooking the moor, thought the square fields of the newly drained wetlands reminded him of a giant chessboard and, so the story goes, the plot device of Alice moving across a chessboard was born and became "Alice through the Looking Glass".
In their campaign to save the moor, Alice's Meadow was divided into 3500 individual, and importantly, unregistered plots and sold all over the world, hoping to give the government an almost impossible task of Compulsory Purchase.
In the end the M40 took a more eastern route promoted by a public enquiry and missing Ot Moor, but the example of Alice's Meadow has been quite influential in attempts to stop unwanted development.
Finally made it to the fringes of the lonely moor itself, extending to the right of the image. Not a moor in the conventional sense but an area of once commonland, made up of rare freshwater wetlands and grazing that the surrounding 7 towns of Ot Moor, (actually 7 very small villages) had for centuries had free use of.
In the early 19th century the moorland was drained but in recent decades large parts have been returned to wetland which I'd been hoping to visit, but after my rather close shave with a lightning bolt a few miles back I thought it was unwise to venture onto the flat almost featureless landscape when more towering thunderheads appeared to be coming my way.
I'd been hoping to photograph these lads in a rare patch of sunlight, but by the time I got close enough the light had gone and they were showing a bit too much interest and were gathering speed towards me so I didn't hang around. Luckily they lost interest when I stopped pointing my camera at them.
