“Mirrors” introduction, 2022
At some point, once, on one specific morning or a certain afternoon, without ever having thought of doing so before and without, until some time later, realising that I had even done anything at all, I turned west rather than east, and heard the gate (then weighted by a log suspended by frayed and faded farm twine) swing through the air and strike sharply shut over my left shoulder rather than the usual right. With Ditchling Beacon and its triangulation pillar, car park, intermittent bus stop and occasional ice cream van now positioned behind me, the unexplored path ahead curled along a ridgeline that parallels the coastline, some eleven kilometres away. Although feet have fallen here for estimates that range between 2000 and 8000 years, at this stretch of the South Downs Way, the track spreads itself out, only narrowing to exposed earth (the consistency of wet dough in winter, baked biscuit in summer) at other gates, or when walkers, cyclists, runners, horse-riders are funnelled together (in space if not always in time) by obstacles like fences, gorse spines, hedges or a dewpond.
A little while after the unrehearsed turn to the west, and for reasons that also resist being remembered, heading to the dewpond became an itch that made for three years of scratching. Dewponds have been written as dew-ponds and dew ponds, they also get given other names: cloud pond, fog pond, mist pond. This particular hollow that holds water has a length that a toddler in a white raincoat can walk in twenty five steps, a width that a small dog (a pug?) can waddle wheezily across in fifteen noisy seconds, and is deep enough that the rump of a bullock sunk to its knees in mud will be level with the surface (dough or biscuit) of the path that passes by. According to a system I devised for a previous book called A Downland Index, this dewpond was the fourth and this is the same number that Edward Martin awards it in a 1909 survey for The Geographical Journal where he defines a “’dew-pond’ [as one of] those ponds whose replenishment was a mystery, and for whose filling rainfall alone was seen to be insufficient.” Just shy of a century after Martin, it may be that that Dave Bangs — naturalist, historian and advocate for a more meaningful “freedom to roam” — was referring to the same watering hole when he wrote of “a lovely bare dew pond and a cluster of round barrows along the South Downs Way. I count about seven, though that’s optimistic. Some are obvious and round, with the characteristic ‘pillage dimple’ in the top, and some are scarcely detectable.”
The barrows, or grave mounds, are the tumuli that appear on some of the maps of the area: the 1951 map whose red inks remind me queasily of car sickness on long childhood journeys; the 1895 chart with relief depicted in such dynamic density that it wrinkles into motion; Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu’s 1646 plan that represents these gentle hills in a series of miniature mountain icons; the waterproof pocket guide, bought to comply with the kit list of a running race and faintly clammy to a fingertip travelling along the dashed line that almost entirely obliterates the dewpond; my 2015 Ordnance Survey which places a perfect blue circle between the 215 metre and 220 metre contour lines and adds mounds, forts, and field systems to the tumuli.
Martin’s Royal Society-sponsored research into the dewpond’s mysteries involved overnight observations, experiments with saucers and cotton-wool balls, rulers and thermometers, and was presented in talks and in papers illustrated with graphs, diagrams and tables. A different writer fortified their speculations with sixty-six footnotes, and still another — a collector of local story and song — devoted twelve pages to the same subject that Gilbert White described in a 1776 letter as one where, to “a thinking mind few phenomena are more strange than the state of little ponds on the summits of chalk-hills, many of which are never dry in the most trying droughts of summer.” Explanations for how these ponds can collect water when they are not fed from fresh-water springs revolve around precipitation and condensation, surface run-off, overhanging branches, rain, mist, wind and, of course, dew — which, whether it can be established to rise or fall, may not actually offer enough of a contribution to justify its role in the name of these features that seem to date back to the Bronze Age. Discussions over the centuries about how the pondwater accumulates and how it is subsequently retained are matched by equivalents that address how dewponds are constructed. Are dewponds to be initiated with a ‘nucleus’ of water that is transported to the site? Are they replenished when diminished? Should they be fenced-in or opened out, should vegetation be encouraged or dissuaded, how steep should the slopes be constructed? Some of the materials recruited to these debates include soot, lime, hay or straw, mortar, flint, brick, sand and clay, this last substance ‘puddled’ into an impermeable lining by the trampling hooves of oxen (or Highland Cattle in one instance).
Practices change over time and some of the other dewponds I gave numbers to reflect more contemporary technologies, such as the plastic sheeting that in summer months is exposed to the rippling winds at Dewpond Number 1, or the ridged concrete surround that I’ve seen supporting a portable record player and burning barbeque trays at Dewpond Number 3. It feels appropriate for a folk architecture like the dewpond that among the many articles and chapters, there are occasions where the tone of academic inspection is interrupted by more vernacular knowledges. In one instance, we hear that “so far from the larger dewpond near Chanctonbury Ring being of Neolithic origin, Dr. Eliot Curwen has spoken with one of the men who helped to make it!” and elsewhere a similar scepticism is registered by an anonymous phoneticized shepherd for whom understanding the dewpond is a functional rather than scholarly imperative, “Times t’ pond be full, an’ times t’ be low, but there ent no accountin’ fur it.”
The dewponds were created for shepherds and the sheep flocks with bells to brush the water as they bent to drink, necessities in a porous landscape whose origins in the intricate exoskeletons of plankton allow Dave Bangs to call our “chalk Downs … a giant bone-yard of multi-millions of years of life … one gigantic pile of fossils” of armoured marine husks so small you “could get 30,000 of them on a pinhead.” Though no salt-water seas, the dewponds themselves teem with their own living abundance, the microflora and fungi from cow and sheep dung, flagellates and other protozoa, the eight different species of water boatmen that one report discovered alongside backswimmers, pond skaters, creeping waterbugs and water scorpions. Others have found the fairy shrimps that once featured — with smiles, opposable thumbs, hair bows, crowns, tiaras and castles — as the “instant pet” Sea Monkeys advertised in US comics from the 1970s. Snails and newts have also been identified and I was once startled when Dewpond Number 3 was brought to a sudden strange boil by a swirling cloud of tiny pouting fish that dropped out of sight just as quickly, leaving only a set of spreading ripples in their wake.
These ripples often break the dewponds’ surfaces, wavelets also raised by hooves, knees, muzzles, paws, flanks, fleeces, feathers and beaks, by the percussion of rain and hail, and by winds that mesmerise in moiré effects. Disturbances in the water can feature in representations of dewponds: Hamish Fulton’s “Dew Pond on The Sound Downs Way,” has concentric rings radiating from an unseen source; the photograph attributed to the British Wool Marketing Board and the Gordon Beddingfield painting that were found in a local history archive both illustrate agitations caused by the arrival of a flock of sheep. Elsewhere, it is the unperturbed tranquillity of the dewpond that appears to attract lenses and brushes, a composure that extricates them from the mundane expectations demanded of an agricultural resource and ushers them towards that cosmic condition articulated by Jem Southam, whose series of dewpond photographs capture best their complex allure: “Full, they are like a mirrored disk or an eye reflecting heavens. Empty, they resemble craters made by celestial objects crashing into the ground.”
What Southam says reverberates with an impression that grew for me around the dewpond as a go-between that negotiated topographies of ground and sky, an elemental interchange for air, water and earth (and, very rarely, the fire of the setting sun). In the middle of the 215 and the 220 elevation markers, the dewpond is not the highest on the Downs yet there are few better places to pause and look upwards, a miniature amphitheatre for dramas overhead: the endless changes in the clouds and their background colours created by the absorption and scattering of solar light; the sun itself; all the birds and their seasons; and the human attempts to fly — kites, a giant model aircraft at dusk with vortices spinning from each wing-tip, the microlights, the out of the blue voices when hang glider pilots shout greetings, and the ripping and droning of propellors and jets much further above.
By presenting the word “dewpond” to Google’s image algorithm, the watery lens staring out from a grassy hollow that I met when I turned west is ranked twelfth; looking for an identical search term on Flickr has a photograph of the same Number Four waterhole in first place; if I make dewpond a hashtag, Instagram has the matching pool, brimming placid and with cows silhouetted in amber evening glow, as second out of 1300 posts. The pictures that these searches return are often beautiful compositions, mine were made on a mishmash of cameras (three compacts, with one getting lost in the process, and three mobile phones) and always taken during a run or walk along that curling path while steadying my hand against the trembles of exertion. As a way of time-stamping my visits and of registering my experiences out loud, as well as the images taken on the hoof, I posted a tweet on almost every occasion I passed the pond, and these, unedited, follow this introduction.
Another means of clocking in came from a sports watch which I used to record the distance, duration and shape drawn by each ridgeline route (the amalgamation of other shapes from different routes became a graphic structure on the cover of another book of mine inspired by this local area, Night Blooms). The array of watch records (W), photos (P) and tweets (T) could be triangulated as W / P / T, — / P / T, W / — / T, W / P / -, W / — / -, — / P / -, — / — / T, and a solitary — / — / — on a birthday when I didn’t want to instrumentalise a perfectly decent walk.
Photographs that just did not work so well were left on their various storage media. Even after discarding the snaps where the cameras and phones struggled in lower lighting or those images where a thumb intruded, the horizon tilted, or my rasping breathing blurred a scene, there were still what I thought of as 60 usable photographs to send to the designer Emily Macaulay before we decided to scale back further to this shorter selection of just one image for each calendar month. The unpublished excess beyond the 63 tweets included here were either too close to something already said or were withheld through a reticence to publicise just how much of my time I was spending along a truant trail.
As I put one foot in front of the other along the journeys to and from the dewpond, the notion of a project began to coalesce and, many steps later, the arbitrary but necessary temporal constraint of three years crystallised, with February 11th, 2017 being the first turn west and February 9th, 2020 being the last. In the six months after that self-imposed deadline elapsed, I only visited the dewpond twice: once to make a film to accompany the poem “Wind Under Whitethorn, Wind Through Wire” for the Outposted project’s collective map of Brighton and Hove; once to sit and write notes for this essay. On each occasion, I felt a strange kind of trespass, as if this were no longer a place for me (a place that I had previously heard myself referring to in the possessive as ‘my dewpond’). At the time, I wondered whether this was a rare instance of an itch being successfully scratched.
For reasons as inaccessible as those which began this Mirrors scheme, I have resumed my haunting of the watery hollow and its two hawthorns (one of which I try to keep out of the camera’s frame, just like almost everyone else whose photos have been uploaded to Instagram, Flickr and Google Images). I realise that what had felt like an end was only a pause, a brief breather before this special site worked its way back under my skin.
Sources
A. Hadrian Allcroft, Earthwork of England (London: Macmillan, 1908)
Isobel Anderson, Chalk / Flint (2017)
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Dave Bangs, A Freedom to Roam Guide to the Brighton Downs (Brighton: David Bangs, 2008)
Arthur Beckett, Spirit of the Downs [1907] (London: Methuen, 1924)
Louisa Thomsen Brits, Path: A short story about reciprocity (London: Do Book, 2018)
Angus Carlyle, A Downland Index (Axminster: uniformbooks, 2016)
Angus Carlyle, Night Blooms (London: Makina Books, 2020)
Hamish Fulton, Skyline Ridge (London: Robert Self, 1975)
Walter Johnson, Folk Memory — or the Continuity of British Archaeology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908)
E. Walford Lloyd, The Southdown Sheep (Chichester: T. G. Willis, 1924)
T. T. Macan & A. Macfadyen, “The Water Bugs of Dewponds,” Journal of Animal Ecology, 10 (2), November 1941
Edward Martin, “Some Observations on Dew-Ponds,” The Geographical Journal Vol. 34 (2), 1909)
Colin Pantall, “Jem Southam: Making the World Richer, Grander, and Better,” blogpost, Tuesday 29th September, 2015, http://colinpantall.blogspot.com/2015/09/jem-southam-making-world-richer-grander.html [accessed September 6, 2020]
Gavin Peacock, Man From Icon blog, http://themanfromicon.net/ [accessed May 12, 2021]
Andrew Ray, Frozen Air (London: Plinius Press, 2017)
David Rudling, The Archaeology of Sussex to AD2000 (King’s Lynn : Heritage Marketing & Publications on behalf of the Centre for Continuing Education, University of Sussex, 2003)
Martin Snow, dewponds.co.uk [accessed September 6, 2020]
Jem Southam, Rockfalls, Rivermouths and Ponds (Brighton: Photoworks, 2000)
Warden Swinfen & David Arscott, People of Hidden Sussex (Brighton: BBC Radio Sussex, 1985)
Gilbert White, Letter XXIX, to The Honourable Daines Barrington, Feb. 7, 1776, A Natural History of Selbourne [1789] (Oxford: OUP, 2013)
Barclay Willis, The Downland Shepherds (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1989)
