This is another of the ponds at the facility, the entire place used to be an old brick works that opened in the early 1920's to support the chaps coming back from war, the original kilns are still there, although now buried under a bund, even so they are preserved, the works fell out of use in the 1950's and the excavations filed up and became ponds,
The pond in the photo was three small, overgrown & silted ponds that we knocked into one big one, as part of a three year project where we dug out and/or enlarged four ponds/small lakes at the facility.
You can see the depth of silt in this pond against the 21 ton machine,
Sept 23rd 2006 (29) by
Mark D Emery, on Flickr
All of the silt had to be disposed of on site as the road outside is not strong enough to support the weight of the trucks needed to take it away, it's also very expensive to truck silt away as it is classified as toxic waste due to the number of fairly nasty chemicals to be found in it, like arsenic & cyanide, so we had to lose it all on site, although we did utilise some of it to line the bottom of the ponds, the reason we did this was two fold, one it lost some of the silt, two, more importantly it meant the ecosystem of the lake was kick started when the lake refilled.
This pic shows the same pond as the photo with the machine in it, the stand of Oaks you see in the background of the machine photo, is just off to the right in this photo.
Sept 30th 2006 (10) by
Mark D Emery, on Flickr
For every tree we cut down, we replaced it with five, we have over 50 species of bird including summer migrants and we have documented, through the Sussex Botanical Recording Society 129 species of native plants, we have dedicated wild areas with no access and where no work is undertaken so nature can run it's course, we have replanted a small wooded area by the car park which is just now starting to mature with an under-storey of Hazel, Cherry, Spindle & Hawthorn doing really well under the mature Oaks, this area for the past few years has seen Nightingales nesting and we have a dedicated wildlife pond that has no fish and has been deliberately left to fill with Reedmace, Hard & Soft Rush, Bistort etc and anything else that wanted to grow there.
The management plan encompasses all sorts of things from small scale coppice rotation to heavy duty works like draining and digging a pond, but the one thing that is always in the forefront of my mind is that everything we do is sympathetic to nature and the environment and anything we do is done for a reason, not because of a whim or a knee jerk reaction ,ie, any and all ground work, restocking etc is done based on evidence and observation, heck, i don't even do the first grass cut each year until the Bluebells have set seed, that way when i cut them, the seed is distributed around the area and each spring the carpet of blue just gets bigger and better.
We actually have people join the club because of our approach to nature and the environment and not just for the fishing, which by the way is superb
yep, if you looked at this place now, you would never realise it's industrial past.