From: 154 Autumn 2021
Author: Chris Butterfield
A long-standing fixture in the civic calendar is the Sheriff’s annual Port Meadow drive. Fifty years ago this involved driving the cattle grazing on the Meadow up to the northern end, from where they were then driven along the public road to the Godstow Nunnery site, where a temporary pound had been constructed from fencing panels. The drive was followed by breakfast, held at the village hall. The purpose of the drive was to ‘catch’ livestock owners whose horses and cattle were grazing on the Meadow without authority from either the Freemen or the Wolvercote Commoners. (Owing to the lack of any boundary structure between Port Meadow and Wolvercote Common, there was no alternative to recognizing rights of inter-commonage.) Anyone found putting animals out without permission had to pay a fine for that animal to be released.
The intended secrecy was most ineffective. Cattle were kept at the Nunnery in temporary pens, which had to be brought in through Wolvercote, so this gave a very good indication that a drive was imminent. Caterers were brought in to supply the breakfast, and they could spread word around, too. So not many graziers were ‘caught’. In the early 1980s a pound was erected beside the Wolvercote car park, so there was no need for any temporary structure at Godstow. This removed some of the forewarning, but Wolvercote residents still had a good idea of when a drive was to take place. And there was quite a lot of publicity, with Radio Oxford regularly sending one of its reporters for a live broadcast.
n one occasion in the 1980s it was decided that an element of surprise should be introduced, so very early one morning a band of selected, trusted representatives of the Council and the Freemen gathered at the Wolvercote Bathing Place car park. They parked their cars and boarded a coach that had been chartered to take them to the Walton Well Road entrance to the Meadow. From there they drove the cattle on foot; previous drives had used horses and quad bikes among other things, according to the preference of the Sheriff of the year. That ‘surprise’ drive generated a lot of complaint from residents who greeted it at Wolvercote, demanding to know what had become of their free breakfast. The participants were given breakfast not in the Village Hall but in The Plough.
With the passage of time, the grazing pattern has changed. Formerly there were many cattle graziers; there are now fewer, with larger herds. Those herds are put out on the Meadow for months on end without being handled, and this poses difficulties for those arranging the round up. Recently it has been very difficult to get many (or indeed any!) cattle into the pound.
The Civic roundup has been historically been done to make sure that all the cattle on the Meadow have the right to graze. With modern licensing and individual tagging this is no longer the case: owners can easily be identified. For these reasons this year there were two round-ups and they were arranged to tie in with the TB testing. Tuberculosis is an illness that has caused immense danger to animals. So much so that the Council is to trial a corridor alongside the Thames, where badgers will be inoculated to prevent it from spreading.
The Sheriff’s drive on Thursday 30 September was preceded three days earlier by the cattle being driven into the pound to be injected with an agent that reacts with TB. The Sheriff’s drive was the more formal, civic occasion led by the Sheriff Councillor Dick Wolf, who rode the Meadow on his electric bike. The vets, who had administered the injections, returned to check for reactors, with the livestock owners in attendance.
The drive was very successful, in that the cattle were driven into the pound without difficulty. They had earlier been herded together alongside the river, from where the graziers used their quad bikes to drive them upstream. As they did so, Council and other vehicles formed a nose to tail line between the cattle and the main part of the Meadow, creating a wall that left them with no alternative to making their way into the pound.
It was a cold, wet morning, so nobody regretted not having to undertake the old-style drive, with its long walk along the entire length of the Meadow, from south to north. And it was good to go to The Plough for a hot breakfast. After this the Sheriff thanked the Council workers who had put in so much effort on the day and three days earlier. It seems probable that this new format for the drive will have set the precedent for the future.