The mystery of dew ponds has drawn the interest of many historians and scientists, but until recent times there has been little agreement on their early origins. It was widely believed that the technique for building dew ponds has been understood from the earliest times, as Kipling tells us in "Puck of Pook's Hill": "…the Flint Men made the Dewpond under Chanctonbury Ring." The two Chanctonbury Hill dew ponds were dated, from flint tools excavated nearby and similarity to other dated earthworks, to the neolithic period. Landscape archaeology too seemed to demonstrate that they were used by the inhabitants of the nearby hill fort (probably from an earlier date than that of the surviving late Bronze Age structure) for watering cattle. A more prosaic assessment from Maud Cunnington, an archaeologist from Wiltshire, while not ruling out a prehistoric origin, describes such positive interpretations of the available evidence as no more than “flights of fancy”. A strong claim to antiquity may, however, be made for at least one Wiltshire dew pond: A land deed dated 825 CE mentions Oxenmere () at Milk Hill, Wiltshire, showing that dew ponds were in use during the Saxon period. The parliamentary enclosures of the mid eighteenth to mid nineteenth centuries caused many new upland ponds to be made, as access to traditional sources of drinking water for livestock was cut off.