Dewpond

I realise I've been a bit remiss in posting recently, partly due to pressure of work (my day job is on climate change) and partly due to a lot of other non-landscape interests that have got in the way. But I said recently I'll keep these brief from now on and will just highlight a few interesting things I come across, such as this recently published limited edition book by Angus Carlyle, Mirrors. The book grew out of a series of tweets used to register runs that took Angus past a particular dewpond (see my earlier post on these runs, which gave rise to an earlier book, A Downland Index). You can see more images of the book at the publishers' website (as it's sunny outside this afternoon, I couldn't resist dappling mine with leaf shadows). I particularly like the shapes of the runs (see below), recorded using a sports watch and reproduced in the text along with the position of the dewpond and a brief text, limited in length by Twitter's character limit. 

 

Angus mentions some earlier admirers of Downland dewponds (or dew ponds), such as Hamish Fulton, whose 'Dew Pond on the South Downs Way' has concentric rings created by some disturbance in its water. For years now I have had a postcard on display of Jem Southam's photograph Ditchling Beacon (1999), picked up at an exhibition at the Towner Gallery - it shows Angus's dew pond with a white surface reproducing a blank sky. Angus quotes Jem Southam on the distinctive character of dewponds: 'full, they are like a mirrored disk or an eye reflecting heavens. Empty, they resemble craters made by celestial objects crashing into the ground.' New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art uses this quote on its page about Southam's photograph and also points out that these ponds were often artificial features, constructed following the enclosure of common land.

I will conclude here by quoting one example of a walk text from Mirrors that captures well the soundscape of the South Downs:

Across the valley calm, the rapid, ringing, drilling of a woodpecker; up on the ridge, the year's first ascending lark heard through strengthening wind; wading ankle-deep grey farmyard sludge, buzzard's mews, echoing shotgun blasts, wood pigeon flaps, whoops from mountain bikers.