The EA catchment map for the River Ock shows how it is enlarged through the influence of a dozen or so brooks including: Sandford Brook, Frilford and Marcham Brook, and Childrey Brook. Those brooks have winded their meandering way through villages and agricultural fields, under bridges and over weirs until flowing between the houses at Abingdon and into the River Thames .

The Introductory Steering Group  Meeting of the River Ock Catchment Partnership was held recently comprising members of local nature, wildlife, flood societies and the Environment Agency and chaired by the Freshwater Habitats Trust.

SAFAG (South Abingdon Flood Action Group), with Malcolm Moor, as chair were invited to share their ideas for introducing flood control measures through selective planting and creating retention ponds to hold back floodwater throughout the catchment.

Grants are available to landowners from the Forestry Commission for creating woodland which meets certain criteria, including the recently added objective of reducing downstream flood risk.

A skip, parked in West St Helen Street, is causing quite a few people to stop look and even take some of the contents. Our son keeps bringing things home. We have a wooden tray, a Christmas wreath, a game, and a garden flower container which I took back. It is going to take them much longer to fill up the skip at this rate as our house gets more and more cluttered.

The pavement near the skip was cordoned off by the police today, not to stop people stealing from the skip, but because a length of guttering, loosened by wind and rain, has been dangling loose and in danger of falling on a car or person beneath.

The small triangle of land in the south east corner of Thrupp Lake, the largest of the Radley Lakes, is being cultivated as a wild flower meadow by The Earth Trust and has been called St David’s Meadow. I’m not sure why.

St David lived in Wales in the early days of Christianity. He set up churches and monasteries. His best known miracle (according to Wikipedia) was when he was preaching and the land on which he stood rose up to form a small hill.

It is a minor miracle that Thrupp Lake survived the plans to fill it with ash from Didcot A Power Station. The lakes are still here in 2014 as a wetland habitat – now managed by The Earth Trust, and Didcot A has been closed down.

The birds and fishes now have a good chance to increase and multiply in the lake, and the wild flowers should flourish in St David’s Meadow.

The Sutton Wick landfill site has been filled and landscaped and there is a footpath from Peep-o-Day Lane across to Drayton over the site.

Trees have been planted.

There is also a lake with an island at the centre

where birds are at home.

Lorries no longer come this way from the Drayton Road to the landfill site. The remote area just south of Abingdon is being left for nature to reclaim in a managed way.

In one corner of the site there is evidence that Cemex, the multinational company who took over the company that originally extracted gravel from this site, are generating electricity from the methane produced by our old waste.

Cemex work with RSPB on a number of old landfill sites.