Back in 2016 I watched a video by David Pagan Butler on building a swimming pond (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JoQthEBl6U) and found the idea so compelling, the next day I began digging.

With a combination of madness and naivete I decided to excavate the pond by hand. How hard can it be right?! Well, after summer and autumn were done I had dug out the “swimming zone”, the deepest part of the pond, and built the retaining wall, before winter came and flooded my lovely hole.

2017 came around and I began work on the “plant zone”, the sloping area around the central deep part. More digging. 

As the water table is quite high and wanting to prevent ground water entering the pond, I decided that the pond would be roughly a foot above ground level. For this reason I decided to build a concrete lip around the edge, before winter came and stopped work for the year.

Once winter had ended and spring 2018 began I noticed how distrurbed the sloped sides had become from mole activity so decided the slopes should be concreted. It was a hard decision given the cost, environmentally, financially and physically, but if it saved the liner from being ripped it was worth it, plus the positives of a pond to the local wildlife outweighed the negatives in my opinion.

End of part one.