Ock Path, Town end - Saturday 25th April 2026

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 Blog by Eleanor, photos by Sally, Kevin and Eleanor

Thirteen of us met by the bridge over the weir, where the Ock joins the Thames, on a lovely sunny day. Our main task was to spread woodchip on the path which curves away from the main footpath and rejoins it later on. This is a task we do every year in Spring when the risk of flooding is past. Unfortunately, this year, we found that the council had only left us one fairly small heap, barely enough to cover a quarter of the path.

However, Green Gymmers are not easily defeated, and we had noticed that there was some woodchip spread out by the path and within the wooded area where previous tree work had been done by contractors, so, while a group tackled the meagre heap Kevin set off to start raking the spread out woodchip into heaps, ready for shovelling, barrowing and spreading.

Ready for work



Adrian and Carolyn path laying



Spreading the woodchip




Raking



Another task was litter picking. AbiBinit had organised a big litter pick all along the Ock Path starting at Tesco, so we had promised to do the area from the middle bridge to the Town end. Actually, there wasn't too much litter, apart from a couple of hot spots. At the end of the morning we took the bags up to the general collection point at the Drayton Road entrance to join AbiBinit's bags.

Sally had been given a service tree sapling by a Hinksey Heights volunteer, so she and Lesley found a spot to plant it. They gave it a tree guard and a stake, so we hope it will do well and add to the variety of native trees here.

Lesley watering in the service tree



Two new volunteers from the WayThrough house, Meredith and Noel arrived and set to work clearing a fallen willow tree by the path. We hope they will come to future sessions, and now Noel has discovered a new local walk.

Clearing a fallen tree



At break time


we enjoyed some cakes




Some people decided to go home at this point. The rest of us stayed, to make the most of whatever woodchip we could find and there was also work to be done clearing vegetation from around the young trees, for which task Sally's scythe proved very useful.
We found a final cache of woodchip in the wooded area enclosed by the woodchip path and main path and we managed three more loads before it was time to pack up.

We were really pleased with how much of the path we had done despite our scant resources.

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