Country & Coast: Quaint village features give powerful history lessons

THERE ARE few more picturesque features in an English village than its pond, and more seem to be found in the Yorkshire Wolds than anywhere else.
Walkington village pondWalkington village pond
Walkington village pond

Certainly, on a meandering drive through the southern half of the East Riding’s distinctive chalk landscape I counted half a dozen village ponds in the space of an hour.

The reason they are so numerous here is that the porous chalk doesn’t hold water on the surface, and there are few rivers or streams to provide a reliable source. Some streams like the Gypsey Race, which runs for 20 miles from near the village of Wharram-le-Street to discharge into Bridlington harbour, can even vanish for years on end.

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We have to thank the Saxon farmers who colonised the Wolds from the 5th century onwards for finding the answer. They constructed clay-bottomed ponds to collect dew and rainwater, and this was where they built their settlements. Many of those Saxon ponds are the village ponds we see today, among the prettiest of them being at Bishop Burton, Walkington and Middleton-on-the-Wolds.

So precious did water become in East Yorkshire that when Fridaythorpe’s pond once dried up during a particularly hot summer the villagers send raiding parties to steal water from the pond at the neighbouring village of Fimber, which had held its water supply for longer.

There have been few water supply issues in the Pennines, however, where the gritstone holds water well. Here, the most common type of pond isn’t found in villages but at mills. Each one had a pond which was used to power machinery and wash textiles.

An estimated trillion ponds existed in the UK at the start of the 20th century, but at least a million of them have been lost, 100,000 disappearing since the Second World War.

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One cause is increased pollution from traffic, which slowly poisons the water and its plant life. Chemicals from the wear and tear of tyres and the fall-out from vehicle exhaust pipes are washed by rainwater into ponds.

But another threat comes from the ducks which are an essential part of the chocolate-box scene. Over-feeding them has greatly increased the population, and they also feed on the plant life that is necessary to oxygenate the water. So there is less oxygen to compensate for the extra nutrients the ducks themselves are passing into the water through their droppings.

Some parish councils such as the one at Cherry Burton near Beverley, cottoned onto this threat to their pond more than a decade ago and put up a sign asking people not to feed the ducks. This led to a reduction in the population of wildfowl and a gradual improvement in the pond.

Some new ponds have been created in recent years, and I saw one being excavated at Helme near Huddersfield.

Village ponds have been an essential element of the rural idyll for over a thousand years, and hopefully they will survive for many more centuries to come.