70 ON TREE-TRUNK WATER-PIPES.
Heslop's Northumberland Words5 simply as meaning empty. But
whatever may be the local variations in spelling, it is interesting
to find the thing indicated in use alike in Lancashire, Lincoln-
shire, and Essex.
We have seen that iron main pipes began to supersede
wooden ones in the London district about the years 1808 and
1809. But, except possibly in the iron-producing districts, it is
highly improbable that this was commonly the case in our towns
before the general diffusion of railways. London, of course,
always had the advantage of being a great port, and navigable
rivers and canals may often have afforded a means of transit for
iron pipes a century ago, from manufacturing to agricultural
districts. But many large areas would then be far removed
from water communications, which would allow of the importa-
tion of iron pipes at a paying price. And the popular prejudice
against their introduction would be probably stronger in rural
districts than (as we have seen) it was in London.
Another set of circumstances, however, materially reduces
our chances of finding evidence of the use of tree-trunk pipes in
our smaller towns after they had fallen into disuse in London,
Hull, and Newcastle-on-Tyne. For in the first half of the nine-
teenth century the great majority of the smaller towns were
content to obtain their water supply from the sandy or gravelly
sites on which they stood, by means of pumps or shallow wells.
Consequently when the spread of cholera and other diseases
revealed the danger of using this water, and a more deeply-seated
or distant supply was obtained, the pipes distributing it would
naturally be of iron. For by that period the former use of
wooden pipes would be recalled only by a few of the older
inhabitants as a vague tradition of the olden time; no actual
instance, of their employment being known in the immediate
neighbourhood.
In illustration of the fact that our older towns and villages
are usually to be found on sandy or gravelly soils, so as to obtain
their water supply from pumps or shallow wells, and thus be
beyond the need for water pipes of any kind, let us consider the
district occupied by the so-called "Hastings Beds" of Kent and
Sussex, where the clayey and sandy beds occupy nearly equal
areas of the surface. Topley, in his Geological Survey Memoir
5 Published for English Dialect Society, Lond., Keegan, Paul and Co., 1892.