We found a UFO!
The Unidentified Flooded Object looked not unlike a bollard which had been buried up to its middle in mud. It's obviously been there a long time, and I've known about it for a while, but curiosity finally got the better of me and I decided that it would be a good idea to investigate.
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| The Unidentified Flooded Object |
Given that it's located next to the stream it was likely to be related to the water and we suspected a pump of some description, although it was not clear to me at the time how a bollard with no obvious source of power should be expected to pump anything.
To find out more, we'd need to dig...
After some time in the bollard pit, and with a lot of help from my daughter, we managed to excavate the bollard from under a good two feet of mud and high quality leaf compost collected over the years, to reveal some useful information: firstly, it has brass stopcocks on it, pipes leading to and from it, and secondly, crucially, the embossed name of the manufacturer:
VULCAN RAM, GREEN & CARTER LTD, WINCHESTER
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| Vulcan Ram Pump, Green & Carter Ltd., Winchester |
It's a
Hydraulic Ram Pump!
I'd never heard of them before, but these gadgets are a marvellous example of simplicity in engineering - with essentially no moving parts they will happily run for years, shift a signifiant volume of water, and will shift it an over an impressive distance, uphill.
Our example was in a fairly sorry state, looking as though it'd been neglected for very many years. Nonetheless, I was now keen to know more and starting to wonder how feasible it might be to smarten it up, if not restore it to fully working order once again.
A quick search showed that the manufacturer was still trading under the same name, and, indeed, still selling ram pumps. I dropped them an email with the "quote number" I'd found on the bollard, and within half an hour I'd received a reply from the CEO of the company, one Charles Doble, who informed me that, according to their records, the installation was originally undertaken in 1918 at the request of the Sheffield Park Estate office, and later upgraded to a 2" Hydram model in 1949, and, by the way, they would happily sell me spares for these models should I require them.
Before anything else, I needed to extract the pump and figure out exactly what it was doing - it was clear from the diagram above that it couldn't have been pumping stream water. However, some 50m away there is another old concrete structure at the base of an incline which I've been told was once used to grow watercress in spring water.
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| No watercress here today :( |
The structure seems like it would have been intended to hold back the spring water bubbling out, allowing the inner rectangle to fill. Perhaps, then, the watercress grew in the area between the inner pool and the outer wall. It appears quite likely that this pool would have been the source of the water for the pump, and the "waste" water would have run off into the stream after passing through the pump.
Unfortunately, that retaining wall has seen better days, and currently isn't doing a good job of holding back the spring water, which can instead be seen gushing out from underneath.
The last mysterious component is this "vent", located directly on the line between the spring and the pump house:
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| Are there Victorians hiding down there? |
Why would the source pipe of a pump need venting? Is there a tank down there, or, perhaps, a room with a small number of Victorian engineers patiently waiting for the last 100 years to be let out?
Nothing quite so dramatic; it turns out that you can improve the efficiency of the pump through the addition of a vented stand pipe:
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| No Victorians were hurt in the process of figuring this out |
Now, with all the pieces of the puzzle identified, I realise that yes, Mr Doble, I believe I
would be interested in purchasing some of those spare parts you mentioned earlier.
For details and pics of the process of overhauling the pump itself, you might like to continue reading
part 2: The pump.
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