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| Pond construction. | The yacht "Catharine" | Fountain engineering. |
Not for nothing is our home called Springside House. The land slopes steeply down the hillside, springs issue all along it and make everything soggy. Fortunately the Victorian fresh-water drains under the house itself are excellent. On and off for the last ten years I have been working on draining the land into them and terracing it into a useable garden.
Having a water table 6 metres above the house is an irresistible temptation to an unreconstructed water baby, an overgrown child who loves playing with water. The first experiment was to dig a drainage brook and produce a fountain jet 3m high in the back yard, which was very noisy and quickly got blocked with dead leaves or worse.
Over the course of the last few years I have laid 30m of land drains and harnessed the water flow to make a small pond and a fountain, along with a tiny radio controlled yacht to sail on the pond.