AIBU to think that ox-bow lakes are a hoax?

[BestZebbie]

As my son is studying rivers, he has been learning about the processes of erosion and deposition creating horseshoe shaped ox-bow lakes from meanders.

He wanted to know if there were any near us and following this I have fallen down a rabbit hole of trying to locate natural ox-bow lakes in England. There seem to be a handful where there is a man made cutting straightening the river, and millions of big loops that are very ripe for breaking through, but if this is such an inevitable natural process, why aren’t they everywhere along all the major rivers in the country?
Do they fill back in after they form?

I realise that it takes a long time to erode one, but there has been enough time to create lots of other geological features (water-cut gorges, stalactites, mountains with sea fossils near the top etc) including the rivers themselves - and the UK is famously rainy, so it’s not like there is a lack of water to flow through the system!

Please advise, geography experts….

Of course they exist, what a daft post. And I've seen plenty in the UK.

Thank-you for all your replies!

I'm gratified to know that 1) so many ox-bow lakes present and defunct do exist in this country 2) as suspected, Mumsnet was much more informative about their locations than the wikipedia page that was linked 3) that they do fill back in and that explains where a lot of them have gone.

Our local rivers are the Great Ouse and Nene, which are both extremely mucked-about with because of Fen drainage, but I was then trying to find the lakes on "source to sea" aerial YouTube videos of other large rivers etc without much success apart from the aforementioned artificial few.

My own rivers school geography field trip was to Symonds Yat (which I think is the Hereford-adjacent look-out point mentioned above), but the map there (and my memory) was that you get a birds' eye view of huge meanders "forming" into ox-bows but none actually yet cut-off.
I had also heard of Cuckmere Haven but I believe the famous ox-bow there was artificially created in Victorian times?

Also now I have seen photographic evidence of these ox-bow lakes I might need to spend tonight trying to find the even geologically rarer ox-bow A-road layby.....

The one on the Wye found by @MojacaSunset is about 3 miles downstream from Hay-on-Wye. It shows one just being created. Below is the photo (taken from the North), then the original map where the river has not yet taken the short-cut, then the current OS map showing the river has now broken through.

The OS map clearly shows one of the problems where a river with oxbow lakes forms a border - in this case between Wales and England - shown by the dotted line. When the lake is fully formed, the border still follows the old course, so England will "own" a bit of land on the "Welsh side" of the river.

They mostly dry up

That's interesting, @jcyclops - I wonder if there are many such border anomalies?

There is also that feature on the River Severn towards the lower reaches where an ox-bow lake on a grand scale almost but never quite formed. The land that would have been cut off is a few square miles and encapsulates a few settlements.

Not RTFT but billabongs in Australia are ox-bow lakes, too. From the Wuradjuri.

@BestZebbie

its because most of the rivers in the Uk are managed so you don’t see this anymore.

This thread is giving me Geographers Assemble vibes.

Love it

Ox-bow lakes are one of the very few topics I remember from O level geography back in the Dark Ages.

Brilliant thread! Took me back to my Geography degree many years ago. I remember the first time I saw a real live glacier - mind blown

@ErrolTheDragon I don't know of any other border anomalies in the UK, but the common practice of using rivers as borders means it is possible. The first time I noticed it was on the Mississippi River. The map below shows a section between Arkansas (on the left) and Mississippi with numerous oxbow lakes, some now dry, but with at least 8 border anomalies.

My Primary School years were spent in 60s/70s Brighton, and I remember how excited we all were to be taken on our first proper school trip down into the Brighton sewers!

We did that with the Guides!

I have a geology degree and LOVED geography at school so was really excited to see a thread like this 😂 as mentioned by a few past posters, all of the UK's major rivers and a lot of smaller ones are managed to stop meandering from happening. Bit of a shame stopping nature taking its course, but housing the population and farming are more of a priority I guess

There was one by us but it's dried up

That's wonderfully bonkers.

I guess before good map marking, in some places boundaries may have simply changed when rivers did.