Bursting the river banks

The wind howled all night. The rain lashed down on us as we finally went out to face it this afternoon. Our hands were rapidly red with the cold.

The bridge at Stonesfield was marooned by flood water on both sides by the time we arrived there. It was up to the parapet by the time we came back from our walk on the other side. Tonight the rain has stopped for a while. But the forecast is for more of it.

Will the waters go on rising?

Gabrielle in her high boots at he marooned bridge

The river is twice the size of a recent picture I took here

This one shows the river off rather well in the gloom

I took a glorious picture of a child gazing at the setting sun here a few days ago.  Now the river has risen ten feet


The pigs mentioned in an earlier post are out on the road again. Such sweet little piggies. Sorry about the quality of the picture. I only had my little camera with me today

The bolters are out by the road again

The river sweeps majestically around one of it many bends

The ground as it was just a few days ago

the river already high yesterday

What a difference a day makes!

I have been coming very regularly to this valley now for over a year. This is the first time I have seen any significant change in the height of the water.

Today it is five feet deeper. Five feet at least!

Look at this shot.

I am not sure how long it has been since the flood that washed away bridges and stone parapets of bridges along the Evenlode. This is the biggest change in the river since that.

I am baffled. Day after day it rains. The river level stays the same. Today even the ditch that flows into the main stream is overflowing.

This bridge is under threat .

Just a few days ago I was enjoying this spring that bubbles up red at the heart of the meadow.
It actually cascades down from the little copse where it is born.

The next image shows the area of marsh grass created by the spring. There was a bird I do not know nesting at the edge of it until recently.

It is very sad for the swans that their nests are now under water. 

I have not seen any eggs. I hope they are OK. There is no sign of the dead calf. Was it removed, or has it been washed away. I need to find out.

The nest will be under water now 

forager

I thought I had better share this blossom shot with you before it is all gone. I did not even see the insect till I blew up the image.

petrified pheasant

Sophie managed to pounce on a pheasant today for the first time. We were able to rescue it. Sophie simply does not have the instinct to kill anything. But she loves to chase these beautiful but rather stupid birds.

It is Hey Ho The Wind and The Rain. And the rain it raineth every day

No real storms her as yet, though there are floods further west.

Blow winds and crack your cheeks

It isn't quite as bad as this looks yet, but the rain it doth indeed rain every day now.

Water running from a puddle on the road down onto our path

Climate change means increasing wild fluctuations in the weather world wide. In America there are far more twisters. No sooner has there been a drought declared in England than the heavens open and flash floods begin.

The last big drought year was 1976. It was brilliantly hot and sunny for my first wedding day. We bathed in the Cam afterwards. The day afterwards there was torrential rain. We escaped to France on honeymoon.

Today has been maybe the worst day of rain yet, with only a few moments of sunshine, long bursts of continuous rain and  a gentle drizzle almost all the time. It is much warmer however. There are no more hailstones.

Hail has been so frequent it has been difficult to tell what was ice droplets on the ground or fallen white petals from the black thorn bushes. No sign of May blossom though.

I like to be in the valley whatever the weather.

When it is wet the ducks come skimming across the surface of the grass only a few feet away.

I was just thinking I had not seen a heron for a while when one lifted out of the river just round the bend.

My camera was tucked away out of the rain, sadly.

Sophie and I disturbed a buzzard giving out a loud alarm call as it sped out of the wood low down. My camera shows no sign of it. Ah well. Shooting from the hip is usually no good.

I shot a skylark, singing to heaven above a large wheat field that runs down into the valley from East End.
I have seen or heard one a few times, but not often.

I have seen so many new things in this April Shower season. There are the first ducklings hiding under the overhanging tree roots on the river banks.

There are swans perched on nests.

I have heard but not seen the cuckoo three times in the last ten days.
They have become very rare, or so I am told.

Another bird that used to be very common, but which I saw for the first time in years this week, is the song thrush. Such a delight to see one on the edge of East End.

This tiny village is like a fossil from another age. It has small orchards with just a few trees, big gardens behind the houses, and beautifully kept front gardens facing the roads. In some places the road is just an unmade trackway, full of ruts and lumps of stone. It has one main street which passes from Stonesfield to the Witney road. But there is a warren of little streets at the back.

Brave picnickers.

This family came out after it had rained all day, diving that the evening would be dry. They cooked and ate by their open fire. They did take their rubbish home but they left broken bottles at the base of their fire. Will they return and take them away? Someone took one bag of rubbish away, the other day. I took another.

The Blackberry can create some wonderful water colour effects. I love this one of the meadow oak.

Dead magpie

Sophie and I keep finding dead animals. She was playing with a rabbits head two days ago. Today she found another dead cock pheasant. This magpie was found right on the path.

Buzzard shot from above

Heron making for the dead ash on the hillside

Rain threatens this farm over towards Charlbury

An unusual view right across the valley with a long lens from East End to Coombe

Garlic flowers

Wrapped around with barbed wire, morons leave their rubbish hanging on a post.
I took this one away

The tale of the missing cow

The environment agency managed to track down a local farm.

This one: http://www.callowfarm.co.uk/

They sell pork at their farm shop, but they have neither cows nor sheep.

I am told that the farmer looked along thew river bank and found nothing.

The office could not confirm this when I rang them.

I wait to hear.

The office did not know a local farmer who keeps cows.

Strange world we live in.

The Environment Agency has now given up on this one.

I haven't.

I include a couple of photos that may help to identify the place.

The herd of cows from high on Sturt Copse

This one was taken a while ago when the cows were on the other side of the river. They are now over to the left of the picture

The Queen on her throne

This shot was taken yesterday looking across the river to the field where the cows are now.
This is the second swan's nest I have seen in the valley.

Death of a little white bull

The beautiful white cows eagerly made their way to the river bank as I walked along the opposite side of the river. I had found one very like the youngster on the right a few minutes earlier, lying dead in the water.

What happened to the young one?

I cannot tell for sure when it died; but from the absence of any sign of decomposition it is very recent.


Why did it die?

The river is not deep enough for a drowning. Perhaps it was ill, and found the most comforting place to be in its last moments. The herd seem to be asking how it happened.

I drove round the valley to the farm building when I returned to the car from my rain soaked walk. I knocked on the door of the house by the farm buildings. A young woman told me the farmer came from Long Rollright and might not be around at all today. She did not offer a name or address, but she said she would let him know about the calf when she saw him.


I decided to contact the Environment Agency. They were not very interested. Since it was newly dead it would not be a pollution problem. Since it was not blocking the flow of the river it would not be a flood problem. They spoke to the local authority who said it wasn't their problem either.

They said they would attempt to find the farmer and ask him to remove it.

I asked them to let me know when they have spoken to him.

Men from the ministry

Some of you will have seen TV programmes, where the men from the Environment Agency measure how many fish there are in a stretch of river.

Today they came to my stretch of Evenlode.

There used to be trout further up river at Charlbury. Will there be any there this time? Will there be any here?

first dump the net

I first saw this unusual van arrive and dump what looked like fodder for the animals. Why would a strange van do that, I thought? In fact it is a box with a large net in it

The men from the agency

Sophie and I were going in the other direction at that time. When we returned the men were still there having lunch. They explained their mission and posed for me and the blog.

They had not yet thrown in their nets.

They posed for my blog, asking me to call them men from the environment agency rather than the environmental agency.

It is just me who is a bit mental, I suppose.

The weather has been dreamlike, almost perfect, this week.

I never loved spring the way I do this year in the valley.

It was at this time last year I first discovered the place. It is perhaps at its most magical as the birds start to nest, the trees bud, the flowers blossom on the trees, and the sky is bright blue with vast white cumulus clouds scudding across the scene.

I was suffering from my old nasal allergies earlier in the year, but they have all gone now.

I think it was my allergic reaction to all the rapid growth of spring which put me off it as a season.

Not any more!

I asked the men from the ministry, or agency, as they are called these days, to stop by and let my viewers know how the fish are doing.

In the meadow

The weather was really lovely as G and Sophie wandered across the meadow at the heart of the valley

pretty blue flowers

Easter egg

not so gud with fud

Not everything is perfect in the valley. How kind of people to clear away their rubbish. How crazy to hang the Co-op bag on a fence. Who is going to collect it? Nevertheless it has gone now. I wish some of the other rubbish the picnicers have left was gone too.

New life from the fallen soldier

There is an amazing burst of new budding life from this fallen willow. It hardly seems to matter that it has cracked in two and fallen across the ditch.

The swans are nesting here

When I was young there were swans nesting at the bottom of pour garden  on the pond.  In winter they would waddle up to the house and we would feed them bread by hand. My dad had himself photographed in the paper feeding them.

Buzzy bee

Dead magpie

We found a dead magpie on the path. Once I found two of them hanging on a ewe tree in the Wychwood on Beltane morning. The old religion is still alive in the countryside in paces. I could not see how or why this one died.

More buds and blossom

water water..... but not enough to fill your hose pipe

We now have a hose pipe ban in Oxfordshire. It comes in just as the first rain for weeks arrives.

For a short while there was a downpour yesterday afternoon. But it was a very short while. We will need a horribly wet summer to set things to rights.

Hot weather with sudden thunder storms would be good; except that in the summer they tell us that such water runs away too fast to be useable.

Having shown you the dry streams and pools, I thought I would share river pictures.

This is what we could be losing if rain does not come.

I love the river. Water is essential to life and to my life specifically.

If there is no water in the river, then there will be insufficient water for our taps.

We are as far from the sea as any place in England here. It makes our rivers streams and lakes all the more important.

Kingfisher corner in the grip of winter

a tiny stream half covered in ice

a very dreamy spot at the end of winter

The peculiar charm of the Evenlode as it winds its slow way to the Thames

late spring last year

full summer towards autumn

Birds of the secluded valley

I include here some of the birds I have captured in the valley. In time there will be a much wider range, but for now I am mostly focused on larger birds.

I am a bit of a Philistine when it comes to LBJ's as the Springwatch presenter calls them.
(Little brown jobs)

The larger birds are so much easier to catch in my lens.

Buzzard on the tree top

The blue tit is such a pretty little bird. They love to hide inside the thorn bushes.















I continue to be astonished by the variation in the songs of the robin. Sometimes he follows me along the paths, flitting from perch to perch.

The mallard is everywhere along the river. Earlier in the year they would be in large groups, but now they are mostly in pairs.

Heron in flight

The Heron is one of my favourite birds. I have seen three of them taking off together from one of the fields in the valley. I seldom get close enough for a good shot however.










I am a big fan of the corvidae. But I am useless at telling a rook from a crow and a crow from a jackdaw. I can tell a raven; but we don't see any of them in the valley. So please tell me which Corvid this one is.

It is a special day when I see the Kingfisher. I am so glad they still live in this secluded valley of ours.

King fisher

Red Kite

I first became fascinated by this beautiful bird
nearly thirty years ago, when my daughter was young. We went to seek out one or two of the few birds that remained in the mountains of mid and west Wales. Then they were introduced to the Chilterns thirty miles away from here.

Today I saw one a few hundred yards from the house where we live in Witney. I saw five of them hunting together in the valley on one recent occasion. They have slowly spread their wings north and west.

Shakespeare called King Lear's daughter a "detested kite". They are scavengers like vultures.
How much of a nuisance did they have to make of themselves to be driven to the edge of extinction.

How long will it be before they are so numerous they will be detested once again?

Cock pheasant disturbed

Photographers tend to dislike pheasants. The cocks have stunning plumage.

They make a dreadful noise, however.

I suspect togs dislike them because even with a very very fast shutter speed you seldom freeze their wings in flight.

This one was caught a few moments after take off.