Dew Pond

Dew pond with ice, Thixendale.

For our Sunday walk, we repeated a route we did a few months ago, a five mile circuit from the village of Thixendale via Brubber Dale and finally into Thixendale itself.  A feature of this walk are the dew ponds along the way, this one here on the edge of Thixendale has been restored by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust.  In another one, the invasive non-native New Zealand pygmyweed (Crassula helmsii) is established, and attempts are being made to eliminate it using black plastic liners - good luck to that.  This plant is the scourge of so many of our freshwater ponds, lakes and tarns - including several of the bigger lakes of the Lake District, such as Derwent Water and Bassenthwaite, and so far it has defied all attempts at control.  But how did it arrive in a tiny dew pond just outside Thixendale?

In this landscape, as in the other English chalklands, dew ponds were an essential means of providing water for the sheep flocks which once grazed most of the Wolds.  They will also have provided breeding habitat for newts and toads, and supported as this one does, aquatic and wetland plants which are otherwise scarce in the chalk landscape.

It was a cold day as shown by the ice on the pond that had persisted all day until we passed just as the sun was going down.   But it was lovely to be out on a bright sunny day after all the grey days we have had since New Year.  And there was hardly a moment on the walk when there were no red kites or buzzards in the sky.  And mole hills were bountiful in the Dale bottoms, or ‘snouting, velvet dingles’ as Dylan Thomas might have described them had he ever visited East Yorkshire.