Cadbury Hill Dewpond - 1 Year On
Some thoughts from the Project Leader John Howard.

After working on the restoration of the pond for a year I have been doing some thinking about how and who it was built by.
I started to realise how important these ponds were to the agricultural community as most fields would have had a pond - maybe not stone lined like Cadbury Hill but just a simple pond providing fresh water for stock. If you get a chance to see
the dew pond just off the footpath near Brockley Court- in superb condition and well used by the animals- do go. These sort of ponds have been used for hundreds of years all over the country. With the Cadbury Hill Pond we're trying to restore a local estate pond and also re-create a habitat.

Yet in the third world many people have no clean water resources, piped water or sanitation. 1.8 million children die of diarrhoea every year -unclean water and poor sanitation are the biggest killers of children. Many probably take their water supply from a source that is dirtier than the small amount of water that we currently have in the bottom of our pond- and we're always surprised at the number of animals that are pleased to drink from the pond- I can't imagine people using this water for drinking.

I already support Water Aid ( www.wateraid.org ) who provide help to the developing world by providing materials, tools and education- but mainly practical help on the ground - drilling bore holes to provide clean, safe water for many villages,
installing tanks, laying of pipes to villages,installing sanitation. They've developed many ingenious and cheap andsimple methods of pumping the water from the ground such as rope pumps and benefit from solar pumps. Another similarity to us as we hope to use a solar powered pump on one of our reserves to put more water back into the field but not for people to survive on.

I wanted to reward our efforts on the pond and thought a donation to WaterAid would be very apt- so based on our efforts in 2007 when we worked 364 man and woman hours I sponsored us at 10p per hour- with a donation at the end of the year
of £36.40 to Water Aid.

As we've just started work again this year I'm doing the same again and hope that some of our members would like to join with me and sponsor the pond team's efforts in 2008. I would expect this years total of manhours to be close to last years at around 364 hours. So a 1p a man hour donation will cost around £3.64. 5p a man hour -around £18.20 and 10p- well you can do the sums.

If you'd like to join in please email me john@johnhoward.ndo.co.uk or call 01934 838309 to register your pledge. At the year's end I'll let you know how many hours we worked and arrange collection.

A small donation will mean much and add to the improvement of clean water supplies in the developing world and encourage our team of rakers and pointers to persevere with Cadbury Hill Dewpond.