The first stop was Nottingham, where our goal was to walk underground through the 19th-century Beck Valley Storm Water Culvert, a drainage tunnel that follows the old course of a stream called the Beck or the Beck Burn. It was the smallest of the watercourses we would visit, but I was still excited to see a stream from which Robin Hood himself might have drunk. If the locals knew we were walking through their city’s drains, I wondered, stealing from Nottingham’s rich past to share with the present, would they consider us heroes or thieves?
In Robin Hood’s time—around the 13th century AD—and for centuries after, the Beck had been a clear and sparkling brook that ran through Sneinton, an area of pastures and fields just east of Nottingham’s gates. Unlike the eponymous watercourses we would later visit in Sheffield and Bradford (the River Sheaf and the Bradford Beck), the Beck Burn was never central to Nottingham and probably was not used to drive waterwheels for power. Up until about the 17th century, it was literally peripheral, running just outside of Nottingham’s eastern edge and flowing south into the River Leen, which was effectively the town’s southern border.
Rather, its importance as an incubator of urban development lay in its value as one of several watercourses that richly supplied the region with irrigation, washing water, and drinking water for people and livestock. The springs that supplied it were on the north side of town, and with the Leen on the south this gave the town freshwater sources on three sides. Charles Deering, an historian of the town who lived and wrote in the 18th century, pointed out that the Beck Burn was invaluable as a source of water for the luxuriant corn and hay fields to the north, as well as the cattle pastured both north and east of the town. After enumerating the other advantages of the site—the navigable Trent River less than a mile to the south, and the closeness of the famous Sherwood forest—Deering asks rhetorically: “Thus were a Naturalist in Quest of an exquisite Spot to built a Town or City upon, could he meet with one that would better Answer his Wishes?”
The Beck’s primary source was St. Ann’s Well, a spring that was located north of town at the end of what is now St. Ann’s Well Road. Another unnamed spring fed into the stream between St. Ann’s Well and the town. The stream originally flowed into the Leen River, which in turn flowed into the larger Trent River. The Trent River, as well as the Nottingham Canal of the late 18th century, provided transport routes that helped Nottingham develop into the central market town of the region. The Trent is not much changed from its old course, but the Leen disappeared when its water was redirected into the canal. The Beck Valley Culvert now flows directly into the Trent, well south of the town’s boundaries in the middle ages.
Showing posts with label NOTTINGHAM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NOTTINGHAM. Show all posts
NOTTINGHAM: INTO THE BECK
Comparing 19th-century maps with contemporary ones, we found the outfall of the culvert along the northern shore of the Trent River. We let ourselves down the bank and into the river, and stepped into the twelve-foot-wide, eight-foot high brick tunnel.
The sunlight disappeared almost instantly as we waded in. The water was waist deep; it was cold and dirty, and I was very glad to be wearing chest-high waders. Chris and John were only wearing hip waders and they tried to keep to the curving, shallower sides of the channel. I stayed in the center where the water was higher, but the flat bottom gave a better footing. I jumped and almost fell when I felt something moving touch my leg. Chris saw me. “Fish,” he said. “They’ve been bumping into my legs. Is that what you felt?”
A stone plaque above the intricate brickwork of the outfall had told us it had been built in 1884, and gave us Nottingham’s Latin motto—“Vivit Post Funera Virtus,” or “Virtue Outlives Death.” The tunnel had been built with care and pride, and a measure of that is the fact that the grade is still even, with no sinkage or buckling of the floor. As the tunnel slowly sloped upward, the water became shallower, until it was just an ankle-high fast-moving stream coursing down the center of the tunnel. Occasionally, we passed openings to smaller brick tunnels. From its inception, the culvert had been intended to carry storm water—but as with almost all older storm water drains, it would also carry any overflow from the sewage system. The lower half of the tunnel openings we passed were blocked with a dam. As long as the sewage didn’t rise above the dam it stayed out of the culvert, but if it rose too high then the excess would flow over the barrier and into this tunnel.
After about a half-mile of walking, the tunnel turned perfectly round, a brick tube maybe twelve feet in diameter, which would slowly shrink as we went further upstream. Dark, glassy bricks lined the bottom third of the tunnel to resist the punishing flow of water. Higher up, the bricks were lighter in color and looked much more like standard building bricks. All of the brickwork was still immaculate, despite being over a century old. The vitreous bricks underfoot were wet and incredibly slippery, and I fell once with a noise that echoed through the tunnel.
The sunlight disappeared almost instantly as we waded in. The water was waist deep; it was cold and dirty, and I was very glad to be wearing chest-high waders. Chris and John were only wearing hip waders and they tried to keep to the curving, shallower sides of the channel. I stayed in the center where the water was higher, but the flat bottom gave a better footing. I jumped and almost fell when I felt something moving touch my leg. Chris saw me. “Fish,” he said. “They’ve been bumping into my legs. Is that what you felt?”
A stone plaque above the intricate brickwork of the outfall had told us it had been built in 1884, and gave us Nottingham’s Latin motto—“Vivit Post Funera Virtus,” or “Virtue Outlives Death.” The tunnel had been built with care and pride, and a measure of that is the fact that the grade is still even, with no sinkage or buckling of the floor. As the tunnel slowly sloped upward, the water became shallower, until it was just an ankle-high fast-moving stream coursing down the center of the tunnel. Occasionally, we passed openings to smaller brick tunnels. From its inception, the culvert had been intended to carry storm water—but as with almost all older storm water drains, it would also carry any overflow from the sewage system. The lower half of the tunnel openings we passed were blocked with a dam. As long as the sewage didn’t rise above the dam it stayed out of the culvert, but if it rose too high then the excess would flow over the barrier and into this tunnel.
After about a half-mile of walking, the tunnel turned perfectly round, a brick tube maybe twelve feet in diameter, which would slowly shrink as we went further upstream. Dark, glassy bricks lined the bottom third of the tunnel to resist the punishing flow of water. Higher up, the bricks were lighter in color and looked much more like standard building bricks. All of the brickwork was still immaculate, despite being over a century old. The vitreous bricks underfoot were wet and incredibly slippery, and I fell once with a noise that echoed through the tunnel.
NOTTINGHAM: ST. ANN’S WELL AND SEWERAGE
St. Ann’s Well itself was a much-loved site. In the 17th and 18th centuries it was about a mile from the town limits, which helped the water stay clean. Writing in 1641, a local historian described it:
This Well is all Summer long much frequented, and there are but few fair Days between March and October, in which some Company or other of the Town….use not to fetch a walk to this Well, either to dine or sup, or both…. and when any of the Town have their Friends come to them, they have given them no welcome, unless they entertain them at this Well.
By the 18th century, the spring was protected by a hut with stone walls and a tiled roof. Though it was officially named after a nearby chapel dedicated to St. Ann, the well was also known as Robin Hood’s Well. The Public House next to the well had its own attractions for fans of the famous outlaw: “Robin Hood’s Chair,” a battered wicker chair that visitors could sit in, along with a hat and a bow that the owners of the Public House “affirm[ed] to have been the famous Robber’s Property.”
Though St. Ann’s Well was a well-loved attraction, the stream from it became more and more polluted with sewage as the city grew. Records show that the city had maintained the Beck’s channel as far back as the 15th century, hiring laborers at three pennies a day to clean out the refuse that collected in the ditch. After nearly four centuries of maintaining it this way, it was roofed over for the first time sometime between 1833 and 1872. But heavy rain could cause the small ditch to back up and flood the road next to it, and the undrained sewage exacerbated the repeated outbreaks of cholera in the 19th century.
In 1872, a Sewerage Board was created to deal with the sanitation issues plaguing the city. “As various sewers in the area were at that time discharging their contents direct into these rivers and other water-courses,” explained one of Nottingham’s city engineers, “the necessity for the formation of the Board will be readily understood.” Among their tasks was to build a new, larger culvert for the Beck.
It was this 19th century culvert through which we walked now. The engineers had done their job well. Though the final years of the 19th century were still plagued by terrible labor conditions and disease outbreaks throughout Northern England’s industrial towns, urban sewerage and water supply engineering like this tunnel were the foundation of a hugely important fifty-year decline in mortality rates, which had begun with the passage of England’s first Public Health Act in 1848. By effectively draining sewage from Nottingham, this tunnel we were in had, without any exaggeration, saved thousands of lives that would have otherwise been lost to water-borne diseases. Virtue outlives death, indeed.
We didn’t get all the way to the original St. Ann’s Well. The tunnel shrank until we had to walk in a crouch, and then shrank more until we had to crawl. I think we were about a half-mile from the original source when we were forced to turn around.
Looking at surface maps and tracing our route, we found that we had walked and waded for about two miles through the tunnel. Originally the entire stream hadn’t been over a mile and a half long, but re-routing the outfall to the Trent when the Leen was diverted had almost doubled the length of the Beck Burn.
We came out of the tunnel in the middle of Nottingham, through a rusty hatchway in the sidewalk between a busy roadway and a church that had been (accidentally) constructed over the culvert tunnel in the late 1890s. Somehow the church architects had forgotten about the Beck Burn’s tunnel (even though the Beck Burn’s nearness was the reason, in 1833, that the church had purchased the site as an additional graveyard for Cholera victims). An emergency system of iron braces—essentially a cage around the tunnel—was laid into the ground to support the weight of the stone church over the stream’s culvert.
I thought the Church’s construction stood as a good example of why it’s important for a city to remember what lies beneath the surface. But as we crawled out of the ground, wet and dirty as we emerged next to a busy road, the utterly baffled looks we got from the people who saw us suggested that few, if any, knew they were passing over one of the once-pellucid streams that had nurtured the town in its very earliest days.
This Well is all Summer long much frequented, and there are but few fair Days between March and October, in which some Company or other of the Town….use not to fetch a walk to this Well, either to dine or sup, or both…. and when any of the Town have their Friends come to them, they have given them no welcome, unless they entertain them at this Well.
By the 18th century, the spring was protected by a hut with stone walls and a tiled roof. Though it was officially named after a nearby chapel dedicated to St. Ann, the well was also known as Robin Hood’s Well. The Public House next to the well had its own attractions for fans of the famous outlaw: “Robin Hood’s Chair,” a battered wicker chair that visitors could sit in, along with a hat and a bow that the owners of the Public House “affirm[ed] to have been the famous Robber’s Property.”
Though St. Ann’s Well was a well-loved attraction, the stream from it became more and more polluted with sewage as the city grew. Records show that the city had maintained the Beck’s channel as far back as the 15th century, hiring laborers at three pennies a day to clean out the refuse that collected in the ditch. After nearly four centuries of maintaining it this way, it was roofed over for the first time sometime between 1833 and 1872. But heavy rain could cause the small ditch to back up and flood the road next to it, and the undrained sewage exacerbated the repeated outbreaks of cholera in the 19th century.
In 1872, a Sewerage Board was created to deal with the sanitation issues plaguing the city. “As various sewers in the area were at that time discharging their contents direct into these rivers and other water-courses,” explained one of Nottingham’s city engineers, “the necessity for the formation of the Board will be readily understood.” Among their tasks was to build a new, larger culvert for the Beck.
It was this 19th century culvert through which we walked now. The engineers had done their job well. Though the final years of the 19th century were still plagued by terrible labor conditions and disease outbreaks throughout Northern England’s industrial towns, urban sewerage and water supply engineering like this tunnel were the foundation of a hugely important fifty-year decline in mortality rates, which had begun with the passage of England’s first Public Health Act in 1848. By effectively draining sewage from Nottingham, this tunnel we were in had, without any exaggeration, saved thousands of lives that would have otherwise been lost to water-borne diseases. Virtue outlives death, indeed.
We didn’t get all the way to the original St. Ann’s Well. The tunnel shrank until we had to walk in a crouch, and then shrank more until we had to crawl. I think we were about a half-mile from the original source when we were forced to turn around.
Looking at surface maps and tracing our route, we found that we had walked and waded for about two miles through the tunnel. Originally the entire stream hadn’t been over a mile and a half long, but re-routing the outfall to the Trent when the Leen was diverted had almost doubled the length of the Beck Burn.
We came out of the tunnel in the middle of Nottingham, through a rusty hatchway in the sidewalk between a busy roadway and a church that had been (accidentally) constructed over the culvert tunnel in the late 1890s. Somehow the church architects had forgotten about the Beck Burn’s tunnel (even though the Beck Burn’s nearness was the reason, in 1833, that the church had purchased the site as an additional graveyard for Cholera victims). An emergency system of iron braces—essentially a cage around the tunnel—was laid into the ground to support the weight of the stone church over the stream’s culvert.
I thought the Church’s construction stood as a good example of why it’s important for a city to remember what lies beneath the surface. But as we crawled out of the ground, wet and dirty as we emerged next to a busy road, the utterly baffled looks we got from the people who saw us suggested that few, if any, knew they were passing over one of the once-pellucid streams that had nurtured the town in its very earliest days.
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