Botanical Survey Workshop

April 19, 2026

Swinford Meadows - on the towpath, upstream of Eynsham Lock


United Kingdom

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Description

Participants: please read our risk assessment here. We'll meet at Swinford Meadows at 1.30pm - please read access instructions under LOCATION to the right.

We're very lucky to again have one of Oxfordshire's leading botanists, Debbie Lewis, Head of Ecology at Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust (BBOWT), join our network to train or refresh volunteers in botanical surveying.

Attending a survey group is an excellent way of honing your plant identification skills. So, if you already have some plant ID skills, and/or are keen to learn, please join the survey team.

Help us record some of the rarer plants around Eynsham that are likely to be threatened by development in the near future.

Based on our NRN principles of building up, over time, a cadre of local people to know and protect the land around us, our experts will help us to identify and record the plants that we don’t know yet. 

This is the first of three botanical workshops, in and around Eynsham.

Please wear appropriate clothes and footwear for the field session. You may wish to bring a notebook and pencil.

Those of you who are not already members of NRN, we'd love you to join (£10 per year) in order to enjoy this workshop and many others for free.

If you'd rather not join just yet, we ask you to pay £15 for this workshop. This is partly because, although we all give our services for free, NRN has significant costs to do what it is doing for our local nature. These workshops are usually oversubscribed and we have found that occasionally people sign up and then don't turn up, depriving someone else of the opportunity.

Please click here and give our local wildlife a present by becoming an NRN member! Not only will you be supporting compost/tool purchase etc. but you will get free access to all our survey workshops and discounted or no rates for workshops that we charge for.

We look forward to sharing some time with you in the Great Outdoors! 

Please tell the leader on the day if you would prefer not be photographed.


Featured Speakers

Speaker Debbie Lewis
Debbie Lewis is Head of Ecology at Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust (BBOWT).  Debbie studied Ecology at the University of East Anglia. She started working for the BBOWT in 2002, where she developed their reserve monitoring programme. Debbie now heads up the Ecology Team at the Trust. She is …

Debbie Lewis is Head of Ecology at Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust (BBOWT). 


Debbie studied Ecology at the University of East Anglia. She started working for the BBOWT in 2002, where she developed their reserve monitoring programme. Debbie now heads up the Ecology Team at the Trust.


She is also an ambassador for the Floodplain Meadows Partnership in  Oxfordshire where she is monitoring the floral community of a ‘ridge and furrow’ site dominated by vegetation communities MG4 and MG9, and the hydrological regime of the site.

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Organizer

Nature Recovery Network & Long Mead Foundation




Date and Time

Sun, April 19, 2026

1:30 p.m. - 5 p.m.
(GMT+0100) Europe/London

Location

Swinford Meadows - on the towpath, upstream of Eynsham Lock



United Kingdom

We will meet at 1.30pm at Swinford Meadow.  Please travel by foot, bus or bike if you can. Limited parking is available at Long Mead Wildlife Site - allow 15 mins to walk from here. The E1 Bus stops in Swinford.   Head down to the towpath which is accessed from the …

We will meet at 1.30pm at Swinford Meadow


Please travel by foot, bus or bike if you can. Limited parking is available at Long Mead Wildlife Site - allow 15 mins to walk from here. The E1 Bus stops in Swinford.


 



Head down to the towpath which is accessed from the Swinford Bridge on the Farmoor side, turn left under the bridge and walk upstream for about 5 minutes before you reach the Swinford Meadow gate. This QR code gives you the position of the gate into Swinford Meadows in Google.




If coming from Eynsham, the safest route is to take the footpath to Eynsham Lock through the Neyotts Meadow (opposite Long Mead off the Oxford Road) and then follow the towpath up stream. This route is marked by orange dots on the map. It takes 15 minutes from Long Mead.


The QR below shows you the entrance to the Neyotts Meadow. 



 


We don't recommend walking over the toll bridge as both the road and the pavement is extremely narrow. 


 


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