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Archived News
16th February 2016
Thirty years ago I was a training instructor at Coomb Farm which was a countryside training centre providing rural skills training and environmental education through practical skills which we taught the students such as hedge laying, stile construction, tree planting and coppicing.
During this time, the pond at Coomb Farm was dredged and the students learned how to build a bird hide on the bank of the pond through hands-on experience and constructed a pond-dipping platform, the timber footings for which I can still see today emerging from the silt.
This old photo shows the students raking the banks of the pond which had been cleared of trees to allow light back into the area.
The next three photos were taken this week looking in the same direction as the picture 30 years ago
Dredging the pond and getting light back in
This is the 'pond' last week before dredging and the silt is well up the sluice wall.
Once the silt has been dredged it is quite a challenge to manoeuvre it onto the bank and to level off as well as possible, given that it's like spreading treacle.
To begin with it is heaped up whilst the digger manoeuvres the last of the silt from the pond and then the levelling will be completed as the machine works its way back from the site this should become a little easier if the weather remains dry for a week or so.
The silt in the above picture is still to be levelled out. The barn in the background is to the north of the pond and the photo was taken approximately where the black and white photo below was taken!
Here I was decades ago explaining the work that had been undertaken.