Conservation

The Friends of Aston’s Eyot is the charity which looks after the eyot. We are a passionate and committed group of local residents, carrying out conservation work.

How is Aston’s Eyot managed for people and wildlife?

When the Friends of Aston’s Eyot was formed in 2010, the Eyot had undergone an inadvertent rewilding for 30 years. Half the 32 acre site was wooded, and the whole area was covered in nettles with virtually no grassland left. Under the nettles we found small remnants of meadow, woodland floor, and river edge flora. There was rubbish and fly tipping everywhere, and most of the paths were impassable.

Our three main tasks were and still are facilitating public access through the path network, landscaping (while keeping it as a wild place), and the restoration and creation of wildlife habitats. How we have done this has developed over the years as we have got to know the site, had to keep up with changes, and as a result of discussions with the local community, other conservation groups and wildlife specialists.

Different approaches in different parts of the Eyot

Rewilding or conservation management? Plenty of public access or minimising wildlife disturbance? All these approaches have value, so we have zoned Aston’s Eyot into different areas. In some we are discouraging access by humans and dogs so that wildlife has undisturbed retreat areas. We have left some areas to continue to develop with minimal intervention, with the vegetation undergoing natural succession. Other areas have some management such as mowing, and some have more intensive intervention to create missing habitats such as flowering meadows and ponds, helped where necessary with deer exclosures to prevent the very high numbers of deer grazing out all the restored vegetation.

Why are there so many nettles?

Nettles thrive in fertile disturbed soil. Aston’s Eyot was the city’s landfill site for domestic rubbish from around 1920-1950; this included food waste and other organic materials which enriched the soil. It was never properly capped, so the plan to restore good pasture failed. Happily this was pre plastics, but in the 1980s the large quantities of glass containers and ceramics buried encouraged bottle digging enthusiasts hoping for valuable Victorian finds to dig over most of the open areas right down to the original soil level, destroying habitats but thankfully leaving most trees and shrubs in place. Once this ceased, the whole area became covered in nettles and was abandoned. Nettles do provide good wildlife habitat as a nutritious food for many caterpillars and other invertebrates, safe shelter for animals, and the soil underneath is rich in earthworms feeding birds, moles, badgers and other animals.

Restoring flower rich grassland

The Main Meadow area was regularly mowed by the City Council when they managed the Eyot for 10 years in the 1970’s. Here we found a few remnants of meadow flora under the nettles. We reinstated the meadow trying a variety of approaches including regular mowing to discourage the nettles, and initially RoundUp to kill them off before reseeding with a natural meadow mix. We no longer use glyphosate now that we know it does not break down into harmless compounds as well as once thought. This area is managed by mowing twice a year by the Council’s park rangers, with the mowings removed so that fertility is gradually reduced to encourage flowers over grass and nettles.

The Old Knotweed Patch was in 2010 a very large area of Japanese Knotweed – one of three we inherited. Two of these three were successfully eliminated with a single application of glyphosate followed up by stringent removal of any shoots found. The third area, Claire’s Patch, was tackled entirely by hand removal, rigorously removing every shoot every fortnight for several years. This was also successful, and all 3 areas were completely clear by 2022. The Old Knotweed Patch was sown with a meadow mix in spring 2012 and since managed by late summer and autumn mowing. Many flowers thrive here despite deer, thanks to the freer draining soil. The Elsevier Patch was seeded with a rougher grassland mix needing less mowing, and Clare’s Patch was not seeded but allowed to develop natural grassland managed by 1-2 mows a year.

The Scallop and Plantation Path edges. The Scallop is a bay we cut into the Plantation woodland to create a sheltered sunny area with flower rich grassland. It too is managed with 1-2 cuts a year at the end of the summer.

Impact of deer on grassland areas, and Shippam’s Field

All these newly restored meadow areas started well with a wide array of flowers – but we found some flower species quickly vanished again, and many others more gradually. Observations suggested that the deer were eating them; to find out if this was the main problem and not just over-fertile soil favouring grasses, we fenced off part of the Main Meadow. It immediately became clear that the impact of deer grazing was huge, with very obvious differences inside and outside the exclosure. 

Building on this, in summer 2025 we stripped the nettles and top few inches of soil in a large open area off Plantation Path, and fenced most of it to keep the deer out. It was then re-seeded with a wide variety of meadow, woodland edge and other native flowering plants, for the benefit of many invertebrates and for birds to benefit from seed and insects. It’s called Shippam’s Field after the large numbers of Shippam’s paste jars found here.

Outside the deer exclosures, we promote those few plants which resist grazing –thistles and ragwortamong them. They may be weeds, but they are brilliant for pollinating insects. 

Ragwort is poisonous for horses and to some extent other herbivores, but we are very unlikely to keep horses on site (dogs, broken glass). Horses avoid live ragwort unless very short of forage – but the cut grass should not be used as hay, as when dry ragwort becomes more palatable. Ragwort is popular with pollinating insects, and the yellow and black caterpillars of the Cinnabar moth feed on it.

Woodland 

The three main patches of woodland on the Eyot are:

Wild Wood is the area from the main cinder track down to the Cherwell. The trees are mainly self-seeded, and include ash, willow and hawthorn, with cherry trees near the main path and alder along the Cherwell bank. Apart from removal of dangerous trees near the paths or river, we do not manage it at all.

The Orchard is an area of fruit trees (mostly apple) with pear, hawthorn and a few taller trees. We think the fruit trees are self seeded, perhaps from market waste dumped here. Most are not recognisable varieties, and many of the apples are not particularly good to eat. It’s not a neglected traditional orchard. We occasionally cut back hawthorn and sycamore saplings to let more light on the fruit trees, but otherwise leave it as an excellent wildlife habitat.

The Plantation runs alongside the Metal Scrapyard and the Shire Lake ditch, and was planted by the City Council in 1981-2. The trees were planted close together and were never thinned out as they grew, so they are mostly very tall and thin. Ash and poplar predominate now, with some alder, oak, cherry, field maple and hawthorn. We removed half the trees in stages through 2012-2015 to give the remaining trees more space, and introduced more shrubs to create an understory. We continue to manage the Plantation, particularly at the south end nearest the school where we have deer exclosures to encourage a shrubby understory and a more varied woodland ground flora.

Elsewhere there are patches of scrub, some pre-dating the arrival of the deer, and some planted, and lots of specimen trees which were planted in the 1970’s. We have planted over 1000 trees and shrubs since 2010, mainly to expand the range of woody species. New plantings all have to be protected against deer browsing with tree guards.

Ivy is a really valuable plant for wildlife, providing shelter, nectar rich flowers late in the season, and berries in the second half of the winter when most other berries have gone. For this reason we leave it on trees where we can, removing it only on vulnerable trees we want to keep, or where it is shading other habitats to their detriment.

River banks

The veteran crack willows along the Thames and Cherwell banks are a speciality, and pre-date the rubbish tipping, as can be seen in old photos. They are managed by continuing the periodic pollarding they have always had. Many of the ones along the Thames are very fragile now and some are beginning to collapse. The hollow trunks provide valuable habitat.

We found remnants of the original flood meadow flora under the nettles, especially along the more open Thames bank. Initially we weeded the nettles away, but then found that just exposed the plants to deer grazing. So we fenced off some small patches, and dug, fenced and resowed a larger area. This allows the classic bank plants to thrive, and we manage them by maintaining the fences and weeding out nettles and creeping thistle.

The Shire Lake Ditch runs round the eastern side of the Eyot, from the Cherwell to the Thames, and used to be a branch of the Cherwell until it was straightened by digging the “New Cut” to reduce winter flooding. Now it is prone to silting up, and there is only through flow when the river levels are high – the rest of the year it fills and empties from each end but doesn’t flow through. It has two surface drainage outlets (at the Jackdaw Lane bridge and by the school) where road drainage from local streets up to the Cowley Road ends up in the ditch. This has caused numerous pollution incidents – we’ve had to get Thames Water to locate and correct several properties whose sewage outflow has been wrongly plumbed into the surface drainage pipes.

The Friends manage the ditch by removing fallen trees and branches from the water and digging out excess vegetation to help the through flow. We also cut back overhanging vegetation to let in sunlight, as this will promote aquatic plant growth and beneficial bacteria to soak up the pollution. In the better sections we see small fish, kingfishers, dragonflies and the very occasional otter.