Anthony Cheke takes us on a visit to one of the city’s best-kept secret places

Everyone in Oxford knows Christ Church Meadow, but Christ Church Rubbish Dump? I’m not joking, between the wars and into the 1940s, Oxford’s tip lay on college land just off Iffley Road down Jackdaw Lane, characterised by novelist Dorothy Sayers in Gaudy Night as the “Corporation garbage dump … where a cloud of flies circled about a horrid mound of putrefaction”.

Now however, the former dump is an unofficial nature reserve, a 30-acre patch of land known since the 1400s as Aston’s Eyot. For decades it has experienced what can best be described as benign neglect, becoming a patchwork of willow and cherry woodland, a poplar and ash plantation, elder and hawthorn scrub, and swathes of nettles. It is surrounded by water — the Thames, the Cherwell ‘new cut’ and the latter’s old course, the Shire Lake Ditch. Fully open to the public with Christ Church’s blessing, it can be reached down Jackdaw Lane past the scrapyard, or from Meadow Lane via the city council’s Kidneys Nature Park.

By the early 2000s, this popular area for a stroll in urban countryside had become very overgrown and a hotspot for antisocial activity, making many locals who wanted to walk there feel unsafe. In 2010 a local resident called some meetings to galvanise action to restore its better side. As a result, the Friends of Aston’s Eyot was formed, and has worked ever since to enhance the area while preserving its characteristic wildness.

Anti-social behaviour has happily dropped away as the Eyot is busier with more legitimate enjoyment of the open space.

Just a stone’s throw from Iffley Fields housing, the variety of wildlife is surprising. A short walk from your front door in East Oxford and you can see roe deer, muntjac and rabbits, with badgers and foxes if you go at dawn or dusk. Over a hundred species of birds have been seen, with breeding woodpeckers, jays, sparrowhawks, tawny owls and bullfinches to name but a few. There are grass snakes, frogs and toads, and lots of butterflies, moths, bees, dragonflies and other insects.

The main paths are mown by the City Council by agreement with the college, so walking is easy, though off the paths the ex-landfill fertility supports brambles and nettles which protect the wildlife from too much disturbance from visitors and their dogs. The upside is lots of blackberries in autumn.

The Friends group are all volunteers, and our main activity has been planting a wider variety of trees, converting some nettle into wildflower meadows, taking out invasive Japanese knotweed, and putting up nesting boxes. Being so close to housing it can get busy on summer nights — some people are tidy, others thoughtlessly leave their cans and mess. Public-spirited users, including the Friends, tidy up after them, but please take your litter home — most people appreciate a litter-free zone.

Although we keep intervention to a minimum, young trees have to be weeded and protected from deer, meadows and smaller paths need mowing occasionally, and there are all sorts of little but time-consuming jobs which need doing to keep the place open and accessible. We also put on public events like dawn and dusk chorus walks, pond-dipping, moth-trapping and bat-detecting. We are always looking for volunteers to help us keep Aston’s Eyot one of the richest wildlife spots in the city — first time visitors are often astonished that it even exists, let alone its diversity. Once in the middle of the Eyot you would hardly know you were in a city at all.