Country diary: a small wild place by the side of the canal

Airedale, West Yorkshire: This tiny community patch hosts damselflies and swallows, mallards and moorhens

There's a hole in the wall. We hope they never get round to fixing it. The wall is the retaining stonework of the canal bywash, a bent offshoot down which tumbles overspill from the lock pound. The hole opens on to a French drain that runs down through a tangle of undergrowth to a pond. There is a duck house in the pond.

This sloped rectangle of wetland and bright greenery beside the stately old Leeds-Liverpool canal is Hirst Wood, our newest nature reserve, a community patch with barely the footprint of a couple of semi-detached houses, hewn and shaped from unpromising scrub by hours of volunteer labour. The pond is at its heart. No: the pond is its heart, its life source. As we slosh through a wet summer it's good to spend a little time reflecting on water as a vibrant and vivifying thing (even as we wring it from our socks and curse our canvas trainers).