Water Wheel

For centuries the wells here provided clean water for those living nearby.

This water wheel was installed in the 1800s to power a pump which supplied water to the Palace for domestic use.

However, in the 1870s Bishop Hervey’s children caught typhoid fever. He suspected that contaminated water had caused their illness. He may well have been right – most of the city’s wells were eventually classed as unfit for drinking because liquid sewage from cesspits leached into groundwater sources.*

Pump

*From a sign board next to the pump.

16 Comments CherryPie on May 13th 2017

16 Responses to “Water Supply”

  1. Sean Jeating says:

    Sometimes I wonder, if our ancestors, had they had our generation’s knowledge, would have been as utterly stupid as we ‘know-alls” are.

  2. The Yum List says:

    It constantly amazes me to think about the technology people had in place so many years back.

  3. wiggia says:

    The Hervey family were responsible for Ickworth House in Suffolk, and when I lived not far from there in the nineties the press were constantly full of stories of the 7th Earl squandering away his £21 million pound fortune on drugs and everything else, a good read here about all of them.

    https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/ickworth/features/whos-who-in-the-ickworth-hervey-family

  4. shabana says:

    amazing that your ancestors were so well in their developments !
    such works are like trees which ’s fruit eat the later generations

  5. James Higham says:

    Caught me short there – it looks remarkably like one we have near us.

  6. You have to visit Haxted Watermill Museum one day.

  7. I love visiting mills and seeing water wheels in action. We don’t realise sometimes how lucky we are with piped clean water supply ! :)