Waterworks

Life shorn of essentials – heat, light, food and water – makes for a grim state of affairs. On the macro scale that’s the reality that is facing so many people this winter. On the micro, personal scale we faced our own domestic emergency last week. When Kim ran a bath on Thursday night and no water came out the taps we knew we were in trouble. Like most of our rural neighbours The Corner House is on a private water supply. A spring in the hillside, some 400 yards away, in our neighbouring farmer’s field, across the single track C road that links us to the world. The spring supplies two family households at the farm as well as us. As Southridge has just had a new borehole sunk to meet the increased needs of supporting their beef herd so we immediately wonder if the two events were connected. But no, they were not, of course and it’s only our place that’s affected.

Gravity alone delivers the water to the kitchen, from where it has to be pumped to the holding and header tanks up in the loft. The pump runs through a litany of sounds each day and the one it was making that morning was not sounding good. That’s because the supply, never strong, must have dwindled to a trickle causing the poor old pump to overheat and die. We disconnect and start dialling. Next day Lady luck brings salvation in the convivial form of local plumber Nigel to our door.

After a brief Q & A he and I go up to the tank, set in the ground below the hill crest where the spring water is stored. I say hill, but in reality it’s more of a gradual incline. And that could be part of the problem, as there’s little gravitational force at the best of times. Stepping over a corral of barbed wire we lift the metal cover and discover the 2,000 litre capacity tank to be full and the water clear.

At the top of the concrete chamber there’s a ceramic pipe outlet, acting as a run off to supply veteran ceramic watering troughs for stock just downhill. In summer the line often runs dry and animals – frog or mole – have been known to creep up the pipe’s course to fall and drown in the tank, sometimes even blocking the outlets. But no, there’s no discernible blockage now. We lower the metal lid and return to the house to puzzle it out.

Clearly it’s a pipe problem. A leak, or more likely, leaks somewhere. Chances are it’s a metal pipe in the field. Jamie, our old school farming neighbour, gets involved. The pipework could conceivably date to when the cottage was built, as the farm’s shepherd accommodation and barns, back in 1878. Next day I help Jamie search for any giveaway extra wet spots, find none but he goes on to mark the course with wood poles, and suddenly a continuous slight indentation in the ground is revealed. Is it straight all the way? Did modern material replace metal where it crosses the road and/or enters the house? Has the accumulated weight of loaded timber wagons and gravel lorries back and forth from the forest damaged the pipework under the tarmac?

Nigel gets on the phone. He’s direct and talks the technical talk. ‘I’ve a house with no water’ he starts and it goes on from there. (He’s not really the sort of guy to take no for an answer). Twin brothers from a local water engineers business drive up in a Landrover, pulling a compressor, and between them they blast 700 litres of water back up through the system. Disturbed fine silt clouds the header tank on the hill but nothing gives otherwise. The lads pack up and go.

Meanwhile we carry on as we did during the blackout caused by last winter’s storm. (See ‘Arwen and After’ December 2021 entry) We’re back utilising water from the garden and house butts and filling our carriers with drinking water from the yard tap up at the farm. By Monday Nigel and his electrician Kevin (another neighbour from down the road) have taken out the old pump and rigged us up with a temporary plastic tank and second hand pump out on the garden path with pipes feeding in and out, which we’re shown how to work. This way we maintain a daily supply. Takes 2.5 hours to fill and only 12 minutes to empty.

Jim arrives with an all singing all dancing mini-digger he’s borrowed from a family member to do our job. Exploratory excavation at the field edge where it meets the corner road verge reveals a join of metal pipe and MDPE (a.k.a. Alkathene) blue pipe that carries the supply under the road. Phew!

This excavated final length of metal pipe is like a flute – lined with holes! It’s a wonder we’ve received any water at all in recent times. If it had been metal under the road they would have had to try sleeving the new pipe through the old one or got special kit in to ‘mole’ a new tunnel through, which would have been very challenging. The worst case scenario would have involved a road closure order and didn’t really bear thinking about.

The small bucket of the digger in Jim’s expert hands made for rapid trench work across the field. Luckily there were only a couple of buried rocks in his way. Below a thin layer of topsoil the ground is revealed as a shield of dense clay.

Curled slabs of it, like scoops of butter or ice cream, start to bank up either side as the machine on its caterpillar tracks advances and the new blue pipe is laid in its wake up to the tank. At that end a bend in the old metal pipe is unearthed, dense with years of accumulated limescale, a metallic hardening of the arteries, restricting free flow. An occupational hazard of hard water areas like this one.

The road is at its widest outside our house where it turns sharp left and Jimmy has just enough room where tarmac meets our side’s kerbstone to intercept the pipe and divert the new alkathene piping through the yard to the garage, where ta pump and storage tank will be set up. In the process he uses a sonic detector to locate the underground electric supply cable and carefully works around it with a shovel.

Nigel is not just a skilled plumber and problem solver but also a canny project manager and negotiator who puts everybody’s minds at rest as to what’s happening and why. (‘It’s a pig of a job alright’) We agree between us all that the new junction he’s proposing to fit will be a joint affair at the lowest point in the tank. Previously ours was lower than the farm’s meaning their two households (father’s & son’s) would run out of water first in a drought. Jamie is subsequently happy to contribute to the cost. This whole operation will be a dear one, with all the necessary major work involved spread over many days.

The immediate crisis passed we are reconnected within the week and with a significantly increased flow of spring water. We now no longer have a noisy pump in the kitchen, that could be heard labouring away all over the house, but instead we’ve a more powerful pump, with a big tank, set up out of earshot, in the workshop/garage. The internal reservoir means we can check the flow at this end for the first time ever. Electrician Kevin’s put in a new circuit for the garage and laid cabling up to the loft to power a new float switch to regulate the stop and flow.

After a full week of activity there’s still work to complete, most of it concerned with making good after all the disruption and re-routing to and from the garage. This week Jim returned to fill in the field trench, made more challenging by the weekend’s rainwater that’s drained into it and the intractable nature of the great lumps of clay that will take an age to settle, even after being tamped down by the digger’s wide bucket head. Three dumpy bags of gravel were delivered last week and Jimmy will spread the stones across the yard – skillfully using the widest bucket as a brush – once the last of the new pipe has been laid in its trench, in the front garden, outside the house.

In my latter life lived in ‘This Other Eden’, despite the odd exception to the rule, am always happy to be reminded of what makes our rural community so special. In manifests itself in the form of old fashioned virtues, tried and tested on the tenets of good neighbourliness and mutual self interest, where expert artisan skills are coupled with humorous and open dialogue to get things done.

Jim, Kevin and Nigel have been our three musketeers. When thinking through and suggesting solutions to the problems of last week Nigel said that as country people he knew we understood where he was coming from (we did) and that whatever he proposed to do for us, he would do if it were his place. And you know you believe him, count your blessings, and smile.