72
ON TREE-TRUNK WATER-PIPES.
Wicken Bonant, near Saffron Walden, in 1869. In each case
the mischief was clearly shown to be traceable to a water
supply from shallow wells in the gravel on which the houses
stood. At Terling some water was also obtained from the Ter
where it flowed through the village; and at Page Green Water-
works supplied some of the houses. But the shallow-well water
was evidently the most popular at Page Green, and we are told
that the inhabitants were surprised to find that it was supposed
to have anything injurious in it, "and amused at its being
analysed." This popular preference for shallow-well water to
that from waterworks, in a London suburb, in the year 1865,
enables us to realise the still stronger feelings of the same kind
which must have prevailed in rural districts up to that time,
and have tended to prevent any considerable use of wooden
water-pipes in small country towns after their disuse in London
and other great centres of population.
Essex is a county in which we might expect to find a special
abundance of survivals of old wooden appliances of all kinds. It
is one of the most uniformly well-wooded of districts, has many
wooden village spires, abounds with wooden houses, and has (as
Matthew Arnold notes in his Letters) an "ancient" look
generally. Finding that Chelmsford, though on a gravelly site,
was in 1771 using pipes to convey water from the Burgess Well
to the Conduit in the Market Place, I wrote to Mr. F.
Chancellor, F.R.I.B.A., &c., asking him if they were, or, so far
as he knew, ever had been, of wood. However, he was good
enough to inform me that as the supply came from a spring only
650 yards away, the pipe was of lead. He was well aware of
the former use of tree-trunk pipes, and remembered seeing many
disinterred some years ago in Bishopsgate Street, when a new
iron main was being laid; at the time when the Great Eastern
Terminus was at Shoreditch. But, as regards Essex, Mr.
Chancellor replied:—"I never remember seeing anything of the
kind in the county; the nearest approach to it is the old Tree-
Pump, which used to be very common in this county, and I
daresay there may be one or two left."
Though, from one point of view, tree-pumps and tree-pipes
are things which might naturally be expected to flourish together
in the same district, from another they tend rather to be mutually
exclusive. For where the water supply of town or village is