The ghost pond hunt

I'm never one to back down from a challenge. Plus unbeknownst to Carl, I actually have friends in the know ready to assist back at Cambridgeshire's FWAG head office. Lucy and Wally are waiting bright eyed and bushy tailed, particularly as it might be expected, Wally...

Harry - Where are we?

Lucy - We're in here. Go on then Harry, take a seat.

Harry - Okay. Let me get in nice and comfy. What's the plan? What are we doing now?

Lucy - We're actually just up on the national library of Scotland website and you can see on the right hand side of the screen, you've got aerial imagery, modern aerial imagery. And then on the right hand, sorry, on the left hand side of the screen, you can select which particular old map you're looking at. They've got quite a variety here.

Harry - Wow. So on the right hand side, this aerial view looks just like a plane's flown over and taken pictures of the arable land. But on the left hand side, it's a proper old school, white and black map. This is taken from 1888.

Lucy - Yeah, yeah, exactly. Hand drawn. So we are looking just north of the village of Winwick in Huntingdon. If you zoom in here, we can see a sort of strange rectangular marking and you wouldn't necessarily think that was a pond, but what really gives it away is that on the other side of the brook, there's a matching rectangle. And we can see on the modern imagery that rectangle corresponds with visible trees, invisible, dark foliage. So there is likely a sort of damp hollow there, to be honest because otherwise that vegetation is unlikely to have been allowed to develop.

Harry - And if we jump back over to the other side on the aerial image where our potential ghost pond is, it looks just like farmland, but there is I guess, a slight indentation that stands out from the surrounding landscape. It's not entirely visible though, is it? You wouldn't know that anything's there, but we're gonna go check it out to see if that has the potential for being an old pond. Great. Off we go, then it's got to be a car trip is it?

Lucy - Yeah. Put your wellies on.

Harry - Okay. I'll get my wellies on. We're heading back out to Huntington. Near a small village called Great Gidding. That was a lucky little find that gap in the hedgerow. You've done this before Lucy!

Lucy - Too many times to count Harrison

Harry - Crikey, it's hard work. We cut across the farmland, battling hedgerows, wading through hip high thistles trying to work out exactly how to reach that final desired destination, but finally...

Lucy - I can see it

Harry - From here.

Lucy - Here. Yeah. There's some slightly tall, slightly greener vegetation that I can see about 150 meters away.

Harry - I didn't see you checking your map. Were you looking at the map?

Lucy - I was slightly looking at the map. Yeah.

Harry - Sure enough. Right in the centre of the field, a darker crop rises up out of the farmland and on closer inspection, it is blatantly obvious that this is the site we are looking for. There's a shallow divot predominantly made up of burnt looking clay, which we slowly wonder and wade over to.

Lucy - This probably stays really wet. So the crop doesn't take. So that's why there's loads of bare soil.

Harry - If you do choose to renovate this particular pond, there's a potential that there's water just sitting underneath it and that it would just rise up quite naturally.

Lucy - Yeah, absolutely. You know, not just the water's sitting there, but the seeds are sitting there as well.

Harry - And now that we found this and actually it's a reality, do you think there's a chance that you will renovate this particular project?

Lucy - I mean, I'll have to speak to the landowner. We haven't discussed resurrecting it, but if the right pot of money is there and we kind of fit in with the right project, then potentially it could be a flood mitigation project. Or it could be one of my new ponds who knows.

Harry - Well, Lucy it's been fantastic. The whole experience, obviously the examples that we've looked at have been rather industrial on a farming scale, but if it is really peaked somebody's interest who's listening in and they want to go ahead. They don't have the land perhaps available to them that we've seen, but they've got a bit of space at the end of the garden. Is it worth them putting a pond in?

Lucy - Yeah, absolutely. I mean, ponds don't have to be on the scale that we've been talking about. Any source of clean water that you can get in your garden, absolutely do. Because it'll bring the wildlife in and they'll find it before you know it.

Harry - Are there any hints and or tricks that you've picked up over the past few years for building the perfect pond?

Lucy - Make sure you put it in a nice sunny location. A range of depths across the pond is fantastic with really nice shallow bank gradients. So animals can get in and they can get out. Don't be tempted to fill it with tap water, let it fill with rain water, and don't be tempted to plant anything or move any frogspawn or anything like that because you do risk transferring diseases around, just let nature take over.