Cothill Fen - Saturday, 6 April 2024

By Margaret - April 07, 2024

Blog by Sally and photos by Kevin and Sally

On 6 April we returned to Cothill Fen SSSI, which is a site maintained by Natural England. The NE volunteers had been there the day before for the spring cut of the vegetation and Adrian, our leader for the session, was one of them. Abingdon Green Gym was last at this site in November 2023, so we were keen to re-visit.

We met Adrian and Steph from NE in Cothill School car park, where we welcomed Emma, who joined AGG for the first time. The wheelbarrow was loaded with as many tools as it could safely handle and others grabbed the rest of the rakes and pitchforks, before setting off along a very muddy String Lane to the kissing gate entrance to Cothill Fen, which is adjacent to Parsonage Moor SSSI, part of the same calcareous fen complex, but is maintained by BBOWT, our local Wildlife Trust.

Steph instructed the Group - there were 13 of us - from base camp on the track between the two fen areas. There was cutting back sprouting alder on the area to the right, some raking of the cut reed/vegetation from the NE volunteers' session, moving ash branches, which had been cut following tree removal due to ash die back, to form a habitat pile and continuing scything a path for the BBOWT ponies to encourage them to come onto the Fen to graze when they are returned to the site later in the year. We split into two groups, with Steph taking some rakers and brash collectors with her whilst Adrian looked after another group of alder cutters, rakers and scythers.

The Fen was very wet in places (as a fen should be!) and we tried our best not to fall in or get stuck, but a few of us succumbed! Thank goodness for wellies! Luckily, we all had soft landings. We are obviously out of practice with tussock-hopping - and those of us who are a little shorter than average found that the tussocks were rather inconveniently spaced in places!! To make it easier, the rakers were asked to take the cut reed to the second bund in the middle of the pond. Kevin spotted a snake in the pond - we joked that it might have been an anaconda, but, of course, it was a beautiful grass snake. The reed bunds are acting as filters to clear the spring waters of nitrates and phosphates and other pollutants, which would be detrimental to the calcareous fen plants, as they cannot tolerate nutrient-rich peat.

Break time was called much to our relief and it was lovely to catch up on a surprisingly warm day. Suitably refreshed, we returned to the tasks in hand. It was great to see marsh lousewort appearing - this plant acts on reed in a similar way that yellow rattle does on rye grass, by obtaining sugars from the roots of the reed thereby reducing its vigour. This allows light to other fen specialists so that they can flourish. As we collected up the tools to make our way back to base, we spotted a brimstone butterfly and a rather large common lizard, which was quick to move from its sun trap on top of one of the tussocks.

We left the site just as the breeze started to get up - the herald of Storm Kathleen to come - and made our way back along String Lane to the car park where we said our farewells. We look forward to coming back again at a future date.