I walk every day with the dog on Oxford’s Port Meadow, 440 acres of grass running down to the River Thames. Well, it is grass for most of the year – in winter it floods, taking the overflow from the river. Sometimes it is like a prairie of dry grass and dust. Sometimes it is a lake. The water can be still as glass or, occasionally, frozen. Today it was like a rough sea in a gale.
You can usually see bad weather coming from the west, across Botley or Wytham Hill. Today it just hit us as we reached the meadow. These were the scenes south and then north from the track leading from Oxford at Aristotle Lane:
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What does it usually look like? The view below, taken in September, is roughly the reverse of the first picture above – my stand-point for that was about where the cut yellow strip ends in the picture below.
This is part of it as a still mirror in October:
Here it is as an ice-rink in January:
…and as a peaceful lake a few days ago
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I don’t mind bad weather, but being blown backwards with hail stinging my face was less enjoyable than most of my mornings. Even the dog, usually openly mutinous about any curtailment of his walk, seemed content to go home.
Oxford Inciter 