Take a swim on the wild side – in your own back garden
Our challenging year has increased the nation’s interest in swimming ponds – an opportunity to get closer to nature at home while avoiding the running costs of a conventional pool, says
‘Swimming in the rain can be as magical as swimming in the sun,” says Paul Mercer, of The Swimming Pond Company, based at Bressingham, in Norfolk. “I swim every morning and if it’s pouring with rain it really doesn’t matter one bit.” Mercer became hooked on the concept of swimming ponds back in 2006, he says, after he completed a degree in landscape and garden design. “I read an article in a Sunday newspaper and immediately discovered how I wanted to spend the rest of my life.”
As with so many people who have plunged into the swimming pond zeitgeist, the idea gripped him because it reminded him of happy and carefree times wild swimming while travelling in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. He began researching with a friend, Johann, who specialised in designing and building ponds and lakes, and they decided to build a prototype at Paul’s home.
“We made lots of mistakes,” he says. “It was our first one, but the man who doesn’t make mistakes doesn’t make anything!” The first mistake was thinking they could make it Capability Brown fashion, out of puddled clay, he recalls. Big lessons were learned about water containment and also groundwater ingress. They went straight back to the drawing board and studied everything they could, rapidly perfecting the system they now use (which uses super-strong liners) and has long made them one of the country’s leading creators of natural swimming ponds.
“There is something quite spiritual about being in a swimming pond and I think part of that comes from being surrounded by tall reeds and waterlilies and so on; it’s a real feeling of being at one with the world, being at peace,” he says. Swimming ponds have now come into their own in Britain, and three hot summers in a row must have helped. National lockdown this year cemented people’s longing to engage with nature and the outdoors, but also stay cool in the heat. “Lockdown was helpful to us, because people were at home and were spending time in their gardens during a good spell of weather.
“Husbands and wives were talking to each other, people were working from home and perhaps considering working from home more in the future. Some were no doubt thinking maybe they would go on holiday less and if that’s the case, what can we do here to make it a more enjoyable place to be? The phone rang constantly with new enquiries and the order book is full for the time being.”
Gill Cave and her husband Peter live at Higham in Suffolk, and have had “every type of swimming pool over the years, indoor and outdoor,” she says. Back in 2012 their choice of opting for a swimming pond in their present home, a pretty Victorian former vicarage, was partly for practical reasons, she recalls.
“We have a listed house in a conservation area, and we worried about whether the planners would be happy with us installing a swimming pool. An architect friend suggested we try a swimming pond, so that’s what we did. The pond is always interesting, birds and other animals come to drink right through the winter and at this time of year it’s particularly nice, because swallows come and skim the water – about 40 the other day skimming over the pond, and they take no notice of you as they come down to drink.”
A taste for wild swimming also saw garden designer Sarah Murch decide to make a swimming pond at her home, Ellicar Gardens near Doncaster. She and husband Will dug theirs in 2010, and have formed a business as specialists in the field, since Sarah trained in Austria with Biotop, the pioneers of natural swimming ponds, with an internationally recognised system.
She said: “Our family holidays always revolved around water and wild places where we could swim. What is lovely is that all the wildlife is so at home here and so visible. We have grass snakes feeding on amphibians, birds of prey nesting and breeding here, feeding on the voles which feed on my bulbs! We’ve recorded seven species of bats.
“Most of this is so easy to see and enjoy even with our large family, visitors and animals everywhere. Our natural pool is key to much of this wildlife.”
‘Surrounded by tall reeds and waterlilies, it’s a real feeling of being at one with the world’