Collie Ennis

But they are usually an indication that there used to be a water body there.

Go away!

It's a wet patch in the ground.

So it's a really good way of kind of noticing.

Maybe or maybe not.

Then you go to the OPW maps or the old maps.

So there's a great project in the UK done by some of my colleagues called the Ghost Pond Project.

And it's not a hot news coming out in the middle of the night going, woo.

But what they did was they went around ponds area.

They really trialed it out in Norfolk.

And Norfolk historically had a lot of these kind of farm air ponds.

And what they did was then...

looked at patches, looked at the kind of the wet loving plants like reeds, said, okay, and they marked them all out.

They went back to the old OPW maps and the old maps going back generation and they'd find a pond.

Then they'd get permission from the landowner with grants from the government, which is important because they are giving up a bit patch of their land.

And what they did was they got in with a digger and very carefully went down to the original mud line of the pond, which would still be there.

Does that make sense to you so far?

Yeah.

Now, when they're digging out the ponds, what happens is the water level finds itself naturally.

fuck off so it reforms but not only that the best thing about it is they were finding some seeds in there that had been extinct locally for generations but the seeds were kept there waiting for hundreds and hundreds of years for somebody to come along and give them a bit of sunlight and some air and the whole ecosystems came back to life