If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a well!

Before (it was covered)

                                                                                   After

Forget the Prime Minister going back to the ‘70s, here we have gone back to the ‘50s.  We now have the magic of water coming out of the ground via an entirely legal hosepipe.  This should alleviate the ridiculous amount of time I am have been spending lugging watering cans around.  It may have been doing wonders for my upper body but it has been a huge thief of time and hasn’t been particularly effective on the main veg beds.  

In other areas there is an exemption for watering vegetables and fruit on allotments or gardens where it is not reasonable to use a watering can.  Not with Anglian Water it has transpired.   

The installation, if it can be called that, is a bit Heath Robinson but it isn’t Anglian Water’s water and it works.  I confess to feeling a bit smug save that a surprising number of people are questioning it being a well.  They seem to think it is a run off tank from the roof.  Given every house in the immediate vicinity of a certain age either has a well (the house opposite has one actually inside the house) or has had one filled in, mains water wasn’t an option here when the house was built, I’m not sure where they think the inhabitants got their water.  Whilst run off from the garage roof keeps two water butts going (outside of droughts) I can’t see rainwater run off from the roof keeping a family going somehow.  We also know that the old man who lived next door in the ‘70s insisted on the well water for shaving because his family used to pop round from time to time to see the old house and if my neighbours weren’t in they would come round to ours instead to tell us the stories of using the well and how many vegetables their Dad grew (albeit in next door’s garden).  The coal house privy and the pig sty got less mention but evidence remained of both when I arrived in 1987.  Not so easy just to put the cover on, shove a big flower pot on top and try to forget their existence!

I have been told I should check out where the drains and trace where they are going to/from so I can establish whether it is just a tank of rainwater run off from the roof or an actual well…….  These people clearly have more time than I have!  Suffice to say I have not gone crawling round checking under drain covers.  I got the Deeds out where the ‘Well’ is clearly marked as such.  Who would have thought?

The conversation has now moved on to the general view that it must have had a hand pump.  I neither know nor care (save that I have been told the shaving guy just used to put a bucket down but the house did have mains water by then).  It now has an electric pump.  I can’t operate a hand pump and a hose pipe simultaneously!  

The latest is whether or not it can run a sprinkler.  I have no idea, I’m not intending on trying.  I may have my own, independent of water authority interference, source but maybe there is such a thing as responsible water use.  One thing is for certain, a sprinkler would not be running for long on roof rainwater run off in current conditions.  

Sometimes the division between town and country appears to go a little deeper than public transport and takeaways.