Going with the flow

Once the most fertile land on a farm, water meadows are now increasingly valued for the huge diversity of life they sustain, as Natasha Goodfellow discovers on a tour of some of the Cotswolds's best examples

FOR a couple of weeks in April or early May each year, hordes of visitors flock to the small town of Cricklade, known as the southern gateway to the Cotswolds. They are here not for a festival or a show, but for the chance to see one of Britain's rarest sights-the rich purple haze created by the chequered, nodding blooms of thousands of snake's-head fritillaries (Fritillaria meleagris).

Once so plentiful they could be gathered by the armful, these flowers now grow wild on fewer than 30 sites in the UK-and several of them are near here, clustered along the floodplains of the Thames. At Elmlea Meadow, just to the north west of Cricklade, they grow with the rare downy-fruited sedge. White-flowered varieties prevail at Upper Waterhay meadow, a few miles to the west. At a few miles further still, at Clattinger Farm, one of the only lowland farms in Britain known never to have been sprayed with agricultural chemicals, they form part of a meadow considered our finest remaining example of enclosed lowland grassland, bursting with great burnet, meadow saffron, tubular waterdropwort and green-winged orchids.