ADDITIONAL NOTES ON TREE-TRUNK WATER-PIPES. 237
which had been taken out of the excavations there, on the side of
the road near the Piccadilly front of the Museum.
During some months of the present year (1903) excavations
have been in progress in the roadway of London Street,
Greenwich, for the laying down of electric tram-lines. On
August 18th my wife informed me that some tree-trunk pipes
had been exposed. On visiting the spot I saw some about
3 feet beneath the surface. A good specimen of one of the shorter
pipes was sent up to my house, through the kind intervention of
Mr. G. Jones, 21, London Street. I am also much indebted
to Mr. Knock, 54 and 56, London Street, who showed me some
good specimens which he had caused to be placed in his garden :
and to Mr. E. J. Pearce, of 92, London Street, who informed
me of the discovery of some more wooden pipes a few days later.
All were found near the junction of London Street with Royal
Hill. Mr. Jones was specially interested in these pipes, because
he remembered seeing similar ones in the year 1870 in the
neighbourhood of New North Road and in High Holborn, when
the New River Company was laying down larger main pipes
there. He also remembers hearing from relatives that a large
number of these pipes used to be in the gardens of the Round
House, Clerkenwell. The Round House was demolished
between 50 and 60 years ago.
I am much indebted to my friend, Mr. R. O. Heslop, F.S.A.,
&c., of Newcastle-on-Tyne, for the following interesting details
from the History of the Water Supply of Newcastle-on-Tyne, a
pamphlet written in 1851 by D. D. Main, then Secretary of the
Newcastle and Gateshead Water Company, and reprinted from
the Newcastle Chronicle, 1851.
After alluding to a scheme devised by Peter Morrys in 1580
for supplying the City of London with water, Main remarks that
a similar project was suggested for Newcastle in 1697 by
William Yarnold, an enterprising attorney from Oxfordshire,
"who came before the mayor and made a proposal for supplying
the town with good and wholesome water." He obtained an
Act of Parliament (1698-9) and power "to break up the
pavement of the streets, and to lay down pipes of lead or timber
for the supply of the inhabitants." Yarnold constructed a small
reservoir at Coxlodge, and laid down a four-inch wooden pipe
from Coxlodge across the Moor, through the town of Newcastle,.