Circles of life

Shrouded in mystery and once believed to replenish themselves magically at night from condensation in the air, spherical dew ponds are often manmade and fed by rainfall, explains Simon Lester

- Simon Lester

MUCH mystique and intrigue surrounds the history of dew ponds, in that these appealing, saucer-shaped oases were once thought—rather romantically and fancifully —to be able to glean water from the air and replenish themselves by magic. Rudyard Kipling summed it up perfectly in his poem Sussex, of 1902, which includes the lines:

We have no waters to delight

Our broad and brookless vales—

Only the dewpond on the height

Unfed, that never fails.

Dew, cloud, mist and fog ponds—also known as sheep or ‘ship’ ponds in the local dialect—have dotted Britain’s chalk downlands ever since ancient civilisations settled there, although most are far more modern.

In areas that boast free-draining soil—such as Sussex’s North and South Downs and the lime stone White Peak in Derbyshire—where rain disappears quickly and there are few streams or springs, man had to use his ingenuity to trap and retain precious water. Indeed, as these places were so important for grazing livestock, it would have been impossible to service the increasing national sheep flock—which produced the wool that, in turn, provided one of Britain’s most important sources of wealth— without natural sources of water.