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.*
*From a sign board next to the pump.
Sometimes I wonder, if our ancestors, had they had our generation’s knowledge, would have been as utterly stupid as we ‘know-alls” are.
Some of our ancestors thought they knew it all too and didn’t make the best choices…
Once again our thoughts went into the same direction.
It constantly amazes me to think about the technology people had in place so many years back.
There were some ingenious inventions, some that cannot be bettered today.
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
Thanks for the link. The Hever’s were a colourful bunch of characters!!
amazing that your ancestors were so well in their developments !
such works are like trees which ’s fruit eat the later generations
It is fascinating to look at the functioning of water from the wells.
Caught me short there – it looks remarkably like one we have near us.
It expect there are others elsewhere too.
You have to visit Haxted Watermill Museum one day.
I have just searched for it and it appears to be permanently closed now!
I love visiting mills and seeing water wheels in action. We don’t realise sometimes how lucky we are with piped clean water supply !
It is something that we take for granted and it is things like this that remind us of how lucky we are.