Ice Age Ponds

 As part of the One Planet feature in last week's Hereford Times, there was an article on ice age ponds in Herefordshire.

I knew that the area around Letton had been a lake during the last Ice Age, but I hadn't realised that the ice had left behind a lot of smaller ponds, too.  Even better, the ponds are havens for wildlife, and some species have been there for thousands of years!  For instance, tubular water-dropwort is only found in Herefordshire in these ponds.

Over time, though, many ponds have become overgrown, dried up, or been filled in when they were no longer useful.

Herefordshire Wildlife Trust has been involved in a project to find and restore as many of these ponds as possible, along with the Herefordshire Amphibian and Reptile Trust and Herefordshire and Worcestershire Earth Heritage Trust.  So far they are aware of about sixty ponds, and the next stage is to restore some of the dried up ponds, which will have dormant seeds in the soil waiting for water to return so they can germinate.

They are also looking for traces of the rare medicinal leech - leeches used to be used by doctors to suck blood from patients, and modern medicine has also found uses for leeches in microsurgery, and reconstructive surgery such as finger re-attachment.

There's a website with more information at www.herefordshirewt.org/iceageponds