In this blog series members of our team share a photo of their favourite spot on our reserves, and tell us the story behind it: what makes it so special, and the work that goes in to maintaining it. There’s always more than first meets the eye!

This month Ed Munday talks about our living neighbours, letting a place open itself to you and all the wintry magic of Cholsey Marsh.

JM: What’s your relationship with this place?

EM: I’m fortunate to have lived in the village of Cholsey for about six years now, with a BBOWT reserve a couple of minutes down the road from me. The marsh is about halfway between Oxford and Reading on the River Thames. Riverside marshes like this used to be much more common, but most have now been lost due to large scale drainage for farming and development. It’s a lovely little remnant wild patch that we should really cherish and enjoy.

There’s a lovely mosaic of habitats down there. There’s the river itself - most of the year it’s a really tranquil, straight section of the Thames - then the reedbeds, the marsh, some lovely big mature hedgerows, trees, and scrub as well. That’s a really important habitat that sometimes gets overlooked and denigrated, both within conservation and outside – it’s seen to be scruffy and messy and needing to be tidied up, but of course it’s an absolutely fantastic habitat for wildlife. Particularly the birds, which depend on those dense thickets of scrub for nesting, shelter and also food.

JM: Can you tell me about the vista in this first photo?

EM: This photo is taken on one of the paths as you walk down to the marsh. This particular spot is like an optical illusion, it seems to go on for ever in each direction because you’re quite low here, down at river level. It just looks like an endless expanse of wildness - and it’s not, beyond the trees! It’s just those big open skies and the almost epic flatness of it all. I’m one of those odd people that actually likes winter, and I think the landscape around Cholsey really comes alive this time of year.

Most of the land around the village is intensively managed arable fields, endless expanses of cereal and soya for most of the year. But come winter, you get this really wet landscape. The name of the village comes from the Anglo-Saxon Ceol’s Isle [pronounced ‘Chay-oll’] which attests to the fact that it was actually an island in this low, marshy area of alluvial floodplain. And a lot of the land around the village is still really wet, a lot of the fields flood and remain under water for a large part of the winter, which is great for birds – you get large flocks of lapwings, things like that.

JM: Tell me more about what you look out for in winter.
EM: At the moment, the winter thrushes are coming into the dense hedgerows,  you get all the redwings and fieldfares which I like. There’s also a small patch of reedbed which is a roosting site for corn buntings, there’s a big flock that overwinter there and you can even see a little corn bunting murmuration. That’s a bird that’s suffered catastrophic declines of around 90%. They haven’t adapted well to the changes in farming practices, so to see them in decent numbers is fantastic. There’s a big stand of willows just by the reedbeds. If you go down there at dusk, especially on a sunny day, they’ll all fly in from the surrounding countryside and gather in the alpine glow in the tops of the willows in the last of the sun, before settling down into the reeds for the night.

Another reason I like going down in the winter is that it’s much quieter. The Thames path runs through there so it can get busy in the summer and it’s popular with local residents – it’s easy to include the marsh in a circular walk from the village -  so I tend to pick my time – early in the morning, or at dusk, when I can get the place to myself and it’s much more atmospheric. Especially when the site’s underwater, you get a real sense of wildness then.

JM: How about this second picture, why did you share this?

EM: I shared that because…you’ve got these big open vistas, but also as you wander through the reserve it closes in on itself and narrows down in spots and you find these little recesses which I really like. This tree is in the south part of the reserve which is really narrow, following the path along the river. Just like the vista, there’s also strange sense of scale here because almost immediately to the right you’re into open fields, but particularly in summer you feel really enclosed, it’s almost like you’re in a little section of woodland – but it’s actually about three metres wide!

I think this must be the oldest tree on the reserve, a beautiful old oak pollard. Along this section you’ve got lots of bramble scrub as well which is fantastic in spring, particularly for warblers – blackcaps, chiffchaffs, reed and sedge warblers. Then the path drops down to the riverside where there are often reed warblers nesting, dunnocks and blackbirds - they all really love those dense scrub thickets.

There are all sorts of fantastic little recesses, I love exploring all these little corners. My message is to take your time to just stroll through the area – wherever you are, not just at Cholsey. It’s about taking your time and letting things come to you, not going down with any expectations of what you think you’re going to see – or not see – and let the place open itself to you.

JM: I guess that’s something a lot of people have started to appreciate during lockdown.

EM: Yes, we read that people have appreciated nature more during lockdown and have been exploring their local patch, and I think that’s one of the main lessons that I’ve learnt from the marsh. I go down there multiple times a week, it's probably the place I know best. I think it’s so important that we appreciate what we have locally, the common things – far too often we get caught up on flagship species and the idea of the charismatic few. And if every time I went down to the river expecting to see an otter, most times I’d come back disappointed! I read this in a book by Mark Cocker:

Isn’t that such a luminous passage? I love the idea of our living neighbours. I really like the idea of the common, and I think we need to refocus our attention on the common species, because so many of them are just vanishing from our countryside. Whether it’s house sparrows or hedgehogs, frogs and toads or starlings –  I read that since the 1980s we’ve been losing 150 starlings per hour, which is just mind boggling.

JM: What’s the history of the site?

EM: The land on which the site sits used to be part of what was originally the Berkshire County Lunatic Asylum, opened in 1870 [Cholsey was in Berkshire at that time]. It became the Fairmile Hospital with the arrival of the NHS in the 1940s, and closed its doors in the early 2000s. The hospital was self-contained, and at one time they had their own farm, dairy herds, all sorts. Cholsey Marsh was originally part of the hospital grounds. BBOWT took on the site when it was still owned by the NHS in the mid-80s and managed it as a nature reserve.

While the old hospital was being developed for housing, we didn’t have access to the site for many years for reasons I don’t know, so it was left to do its own thing and inadvertently rewilded itself. So the old scrapes grew over and willow became dominant – there’s a really dense willow woodland developing now which of course has its own benefits for wildlife as well. It’s really quite a dynamic landscape, which is what our wildlife needs. I think all wildlife thrives best in mixed mosaic of habitats. We’ve also taken on ownership of two adjacent fields, one of which has been seeded with wildflowers to bring that back, and we’re managing them as meadows now.

JM: How do you look after the wildflower meadows?

EM: We’ve got a small herd of Dexter cattle, and their grazing helps with the restoration. It’s tough going because we think the meadows were overgrazed historically for many years, so it’s a fairly lengthy task to bring it back.

They’re absolutely integral to helping create the mosaic of habitats I mentioned earlier. Cattle pull out big clumps of vegetation with their tongues, unlike sheep which nibble everything down to the ground very short. And unlike sheep, cattle won’t eat where they’ve manured, so you get these little mini fertilised grasslands growing up around their dung, big tufts of grass growing up. So you get this structural diversity in the grassland. And the dung, as long as it’s not heavily medicated, can attract up to 200 species of invertebrates – all those guys at the bottom of the food chain. These clumps of grass are also shelter for small mammals like voles, and all that in turn attracts insectivorous and carnivorous birds as well & kestrels, buzzards and barn owls are often seen hunting over the marsh.

Ed Munday is Community Wildlife Officer for Oxfordshire and West Berkshire. Cholsey Marsh is open to the public and is on the route of the Thames Path National Trail.