Creating a pond - pt.1

The key element that's been missing from the garden is water. Or, it was.

Trish has been hankering after a pond for years. We always knew where it should go: the Japanese garden is the lowest point on our land and is where the slope of the hill flattens out for a while. If a natural pond had ever formed, it would have been here.

We also knew that, below about 20cm of rich loam (thanks to this land being used for centuries' as orchard) there is dense clay. We wondered if we might get away with simply puddling the clay and not using a liner.

The tricky bit was always going to be digging the hole. Then we got lucky. We were able to trade our old wood-burning stove for some mini-digger time. After years of waiting, we could finally have our pond.

The day before the digger was due to arrive, we marked out the shape we wanted. (Well, okay, it was the shape I wanted: Trish kept saying "bigger!".) Having scraped the shape in the grass, we made it clearer by digging a small trench - easy in the friable, drought-ridden soil.

Our friend Gruff arrived with his neighbour Paul the next day. It's always a pleasure watching a craftsman at work and so it was with Paul who wielded the mini-digger the way a cabinetmaker uses a chisel.

We dug the main area of the pond to a depth of 45cm, then a deeper central portion to the same again, making it 90cm deep. As the soil came out of the ground, I kept an eye open for any archaeological finds (yes, I'm a Time Team geek). We found many pieces of a crude, orange tile. In fact, we find this all over the garden in spite of it not being used on any of the remaining buildings. There were also parts of a blueish-grey pot.

Paul, it turned out, is also a Time Team fan, metal detectorist and a keen amateur archaeologist. He told us that, as a digger operator, he's made thousands of holes in Northern France and come up with very few finds. When he worked alongside arachaeologists in the UK, every hole seemed to yield interesting pieces. Maybe it has something to do with population density or the highly agrarian nature of this region of Normandy.

In no time we had an impressive hole and a massive spoil heap (or 'anti-pond' as I like to think of it). Once the boys had left, we tidied up the hole, chamfering the edges somewhat, and then thought about what we needed to do next.