Tag: pond

October 9th – On the other side of the road, on the village side of what would have been the old railway embankment – lies this pond. This is the last vestige of Clayhanger Common’s brownfield past. This pond – now used as a settlement pond for land drainage before it weirs into the Ford Brook – is marked on maps as easy as 1884, and used to lie at the foot of the railway embankment, now long since gone. This limpid, placid pond is testament to a successful land reclamation. The clear waters of today would once have been brackish, polluted and full of refuse.

October 9th – Today was one of those headache-grey autumnal Sundays when evening falls quickly and everything seems kind of dead. I hate days like this. Escaping at 5pm, I took a spin around the common in Brownhills in a desperate attempt to brighten my mood. On Friday, I’d commented that the water level in the new pool in Clayhanger was very low, and that perhaps it was low enough for the stepping stones – laid to reach the central island when the pond was created in 1986 – to be usable again. A tootle round the pond confirmed this to be the case. The stones were laid out of large lumps of masonry the workers had to hand – mostly coping stones from the parapet of the old railway bridge that used to cross the canal nearby. Others lie dotted about in the undergrowth.