THE POWER OF PONDS

Our farmland ponds have vanished, but new initiatives are bringing back these biodiversity powerhouses

- JO CAIRD

THERE'S SOMETHING A LITTLE BIT MAGIC about restoring a pond. It might have been dormant for decades, reduced to nothing more than a misty hollow or an area of darker soil. Yet dig out the sediment of a so-called 'ghost pond', let it fill naturally with water, and life will return. The seeds of aquatic plants, resting still and silent in the seed bank, are woken from their slumber as if no time had passed at all.

Just a year after breaking open this biodiversity time capsule, the pond will be thronging with plant, invertebrate and amphibian life. After a few years, if vegetation is allowed to grow, it will be impossible to tell that the pond wasn't always like this. As Carl Sayer of University College London (UCL) wrote in 2003, in a vivid and engaging paper on pond restoration: "The pond's ghostly past will be all but forgotten."

British farmland was once teeming with ponds. Whether occurring naturally in the landscape or dug for clay and marl for brickmaking and soil improvement, field and farmyard ponds were put to good use by agricultural communities. Ponds were places for watering livestock, soaking cartwheels and washing clothes in the days before mains water, and their fish and waterfowl were also an important source of protein.

But with the advent of modern agricultural and building practices in the mid-20th century, those ponds began to disappear. Enormous numbers were lost, filled in by farmers wanting to make the most productive use of their land, neglected because they were deemed to have outlived their usefulness, or poisoned by agricultural pollution. Sayer estimates that out of more than a million ponds in the late 1900s, only about 500,000 are left in Britain today. It's a similar, or worse, story across Europe, with countries such as the Netherlands and Switzerland losing up to 90 per cent of their ponds in the last century alone.