News

Waterloo Pond is nearly complete, a large and significant new pond south of Alconbury Weston. It is an offline pond taking water from a large ditch that collects surface water from the hills around Buckworth. Altogether it has a catchment of 3.4km2 or about 4% of the whole Alconbury Brook catchment. Water from the ditch is the first to reach the Alconbury Villages during a flood. The pond is designed to hold water until flood levels have fallen. Waterloo Pond has also been

We have mastered software called 2D HECRAS. This allows us to make accurate predictions about then impact of different amounts of rain on the villages and the benefits of our ponds, dams and other schemes. The map (below) shows our Alconbury model just after storm Goretti. Many thanks to Cambridgeshire County Council for funding the necessary training.

Many thanks to our excellent volunteers who have started the process of checking each of our ponds for water quality. We visit each pond to see what sort of pond animals live there. Good quality water supports different pond animals. We also take samples for chemical analysis. As well as providing flood mitigation we are committed to ensuring our ponds quickly become havens for biodiversity.

We will have to wait to the Autumn to see some water in Brown’s Pond in Thurning which will collect run-off from the village and neighbouring rather wet fields via new field drains. The new arrangement will reduce overland flows into Alconbury Brook which is just one field away to the north. Many thanks to Charlotte Brown for allowing us to build a pond in such a strategically useful place, and to Silver Fern for their excellent excavation and drainage work. We plan to add so

We received confirmation in the last few days that we will receive an award worth over £24,000 from Anglian Water’s Thriving Communities Fund. The fund is intended to enhance the natural water environment and deliver community benefits. It is administered by the Cambridgeshire Community Foundation. Our bid requested funding for 1 new pond, 1 pond restoration and extension and 1 pond restoration including a sediment trap. The grant will also allow us to purchase additional equ

Our work along Winwick brook has continued during January. New culverts and field drains now capture water from a 18ha field into a previously mostly dry pond (orange).We plan to create a new small pond (red) during February. This complements the large pond at Palfrey Field which we created in October (purple) and a large pond at Valley Farm, also created during October, further downstream. Many thanks to Russ and Messrs D J Tebbit . Thanks also to Silver Fern for their hard