Site of Park Pond

Then

In the sale of 1872 Park Pond was a plot of the Oxhey Place farm. The Ordnance Survey map surveyed in 1872 to 1874 shows a large pond with stepped banks just west of Pond Wood. A local historian reads its square shape on the old maps as a made pond, probably stocked with fish, in the natural place for water off Oxhey Woods to gather. An etching by Frederick Goodall, said to date from 1878, shows cattle watering there, with the Oxhey Place farmhouse and the chapel behind. An Our Oxhey contributor's early memories, headed winter 1943 to 1944, include fishing for tiddlers and newts in the pond in Pond Wood. A former member of Oxhey Wood School's staff thinks this was probably the larger pond, shown as the Ox Pond on very early plans of the area, which became part of the school's playing field. The school opened there in two stages, in May 1950 and June 1951. Two contributors remember a freak downpour in the 1980s, when water ran off the woods to the old hollow and flooded part of the school. In 2013 the same former staff member, the school's secretary for more than thirty years, said the ground by the Key Stage 2 playground is always damp, even in a hot summer, and that repeated investigations never found the cause.^{16,20,24,127,274,290,295,296,297,703}

Now

The site is now the grounds of Oxhey Wood Primary School. Pond Wood survives beside the school field, and Natural England counts its 1.6 hectares as ancient woodland.

Mentioned in

• Farms and fields: The field names Before the Estate
• The old woods: Pond Wood and the smaller woods Before the Estate
• The heart of the estate Walk
• Farms and lost houses Walk

Position from old Ordnance Survey maps and OpenStreetMap. See Sources and method.