Cally Callomon resurrects the lost art of damming.

“For heaven’s sake get out from under my feet and go and play in the woods” said my mother to an eight year old version of me. We were fortunate where we lived in Hertfordshire in the 1960s, ‘the woods’ were just around the corner from our house, a time before Brookmans Park became a gated footballers’ stronghold. Nowadays these woods ‘belong’ to someone, the footpaths are paved and signposted and various energy drinks have the monopoly in byway jettison rights.

‘Playing in the woods’ required just three skilled occupations and these were:

1. Climbing Trees

2. Making Camps

3. Building Dams

(Before you write in to say ‘what about treehouses?’ it should be pointed out that such an occupation is merely a combination of items one and two. ‘Hunting The Bogey Man’ only came in after initial stirrings of puberty arose and discovering and appreciating damp copies of Parade and Mayfair required the physique of full blown adolescence to have properly taken place i.e. post eight years of age).

Recently a week-long springtime escape to the Dunmore Estate near Alloa resulted in long muddy walks with the dogs and anyone who knows anything about a Standard Poodle will know that they are Mud Magnets. Mercifully each walk ended up by a small stream in which one could rinse off the worst of the clag and I noticed that some amateur had laid stones across the stream to create a small pool. A boy’s eight-year-old urge inside me stirred, aghast with this miserable attempt at the now-lost art of damming streams, and I decided, there and then, this matter had to be improved.

Any experienced qualified eight-year-old dam builder will tell you that the object is not to stop a water supply. This would be seen as a fool’s errand — not the done thing at all. The whole point is to enable more water to gather behind the dam then can flow through the dam and by still allowing a flow one benefits from the exciting sound of a trickling waterfall.

Some 62 years had passed since my last dam. By owning a 400-year-old house, with a roof that leaks, I soon remembered that water has a habit of finding the path of least resistance and the trick is to lead that water to where you want it to flow; never to try and stop it completely.

2,000 years ago the Nabataeans in Petra knew this to be true. They collected rainwater in reservoirs high up in the Jordanian hills and sent it down to the town via an elaborate series of clay pipes into the various troglodyte homes. They even managed to rifle the interior of those pipes so as to swirl the water as it fell, oxygenating it on its travels, rendering it fit for human consumption and the odd evening whisky and soda, no doubt.

I beavered away. An hour’s labour resulted in the first dam I’d built for many, many years. Like a drystane dyker I remembered to only use stones that lay nearby (this was Scotland after all) and welded these with clay dug by hand from the stream bed. The world’s first composite material is best, namely a clay and leaf cocktail perhaps with added twig to aid strength.

No dam ever works to its full potential after having been built. The stream needs to bring down silt and debris to aid cloggage, as any beaver would be delighted to demonstrate.

Being a tiny stream I cannot claim to have relieved the nearby village of Airth of winter flooding, nor was I about to install a hydro-electric turbine and, no, absolutely no villages were abandoned and flooded by my civil engineering. What I walked away from, smugly dusting off my trousers, would not be classified as a wild-swimming-spot for much other than a thirsty badger, but my desire to alter nature’s path was sated, not to mention the obvious acclaim that would be showered on me anonymously by all future muddy poodle owners.

I fear that the art of building dams in the woods is just another of those important artisanal professions that die out due to ’the internet’. Perhaps I’ll host a £450 day-long course in the skill, and I’ll rejoice in the fact that Woody Guthrie wrote me a song about my exploits — though he did get the title The Great Grand Cally Dama little mistranslated in his rush to get a celebratory song written and recorded.