Underground Spring?
sandra255
Posts: 65
We moved into this house six months ago. It's on a hillside in a very clayey area. At the turn of the year we noticed a boggy area of the lawn uphill from the house, but assumed as the weather got better the situation would improve. It didn't, and to cut a long story short we've unearthed (literally) what appears to be a spring right on the boundary line. (The water authority have tested it and say it's not mains water or sewage and they've no further interest.) It's a gentle trickle rather than a flow and we thought with the recent lack of rain (we've had none for six weeks or more) that the spring would dry up. It hasn't. (Not all bad news, we've dug a soakaway along the boundary with channels to the vegetable patch and all is well but we've left the spring open for the moment so we can watch to see when and if the flow diminishes.) Now we're wondering whether perhaps the clay underground has cracked in the prolonged dry weather, thus allowing water from the aquifer to find its way through, and that a good heavy soaking might cause the sub-soil to swell and close it again. Any views on this?
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You say you noticed it at the 'turn of the year', when it wasn't so dry and thought it would improve with 'better' weather. Now you think the better weather is responsible?
I think you have just got a natural spring. We have one too - it is our house water supply which is gravity fed as the spring is uphill from the house. There are actually several springs along the hillside. One supplies our neighbour with water, one was used in the past to supply a well at the other end of the house, one waters the sheep and another makes part of the garden boggy, so I have made a bog garden
If you can get hold of an old OS map of the area you may find some other springs marked - they are sometimes called 'wells'.Like ours, they are a feature of local geology and often follow a 'spring line' due to the rock foundation. Round here they are common and several of the local villages and hamlets have no mains water supply.
Ours has been reliable for the more than 30 years we have lived here, but the tank does fill faster in wet weather. When it is very dry it will usually top up overnight, but we are cautious with our water usage as we dare not emptyy the tank completely. Worth it though for 30+ years of no water rates
Small springs move around all the time in clay soil. Weather does affect it, but also other ground movements, someone building a house extension up the road, for example, or just the small shifts that happen all the time that we're not really aware of. Bigger springs are more consistent. We have a spring fed water supply and that spring is in more or less the same place on OS and tythe maps back as far as I've been able to find them (1700s). But there are also numerous minor water trickles that come out of the hillside and they seem to shift a few feet this way and that each year for no obvious reason.
Be glad of it. As you say, you can use it for irrigation and also make a shallow pool for animals to drink in a corner somewhere. It may be gone in a year or two.
Last edited: 12 May 2017 09:16:54
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
The possibilities for gardening sound exciting ... a spring fed pool and a tiny waterfall down to a little fern-lined stream, a bog garden ....
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Agree completely. A very practical example of that was at the previous golf course I was a member at. The greenkeepers basically 'chased' water all around the course year after year with new drainage in the wet(ter) areas then lo-and-behold the next year a previously dry area became wet! It was all down to the clay structure and how the water manifests itself at the surface.
Thanks for those comments. Very useful. Our investigative efforts damaged the thicket hedge somewhat, and I've noticed that about 8 metres to the right of the current spring there is a similar 'disturbance' to the thicket hedge, below which previous owners have made a cobbled pathway (probably covering another soakaway), which reinforces the comments above about spring lines and moving springs. Our back garden is dedicated to vegetable cultivation - so we're going to save a lot on water bills for as long as this lasts.
Just read all your comments with intrest, my son moved into a house in an old mining area in Carmarthenshire 1 year ago . They found previous owners had tried to actually tried to bury a very wet garden. On making enquiries he was advised to try and dig through the clay which was about 12/18 inches down and create a soak away ,they went down 7 feet needless to say it did not work and the said hole of 7 foot filled to within about 6 inches of the top with water within 1 hour so the contractor dug another hole same depth and guess what it filled up with water . The 2 holes have been filled to within a foot of the top with chippings just to save anything falling in.They plan to incorprate a pond and bog garden and put an overflow through pipes to a small stream at the bottom of the garden . If anybody has any sugestions or ideas I would be very happy to tell my son .
I have 2 ponds and quite a lot of 'bog garden', plus 'wet meadow.'
I have also dug narrow, shallow ditches or rills to remove excess water from the surface directly in several places, as it doesn't always penetrate the soil well enough to access underground drains even if they aren't very deep.
I am lucky as we live on a hillside and any surplus water eventually runs away down hill to become a stream that is ultimately part of the Mersey river basin. I like knowing where it will end up, but it makes me very aware of the inter-connectedness of things and makes sure I will never use any potentially harmful substances.
Chatted to a passing walker one day, who was looking over the fence from the public footpath. He knew the house from around the war years and then they got their water from a well at one end of the house. The water still oozes out of the ground there and the corner has always been damp, though no 'well' as such, but this year it is in full flow again and there is a stream across the gravel right outside my greenhouse!
Last edited: 09 November 2017 14:43:30
Just to bring the original thread up to date: We did, as we said, leave the spring entry point open so we could monitor what was happening. The trickle came and went, came and went, with absolutely no correlation to the weather. For the last two months we haven't seen any running water at all, although the soil around the entry point never dries out. We'll have to see what the winter brings but for the moment we're just glad we didn't go in for any really expensive solutions to this issue. And we had a mega crop during the summer with our soakaway leading directly to the veg garden.
Its nice to hear that people have overcome excess ground water , the amount of water bubbling up in my sons garden could fill a swimming pool, the previous owners idea was to hide it so he put down a membrane and on top of that top topsoil then another membrane then tons of chippings so the water level was kept about 14 inches down till it rained then it just poured down the side path next to the house. The house is a semi in a semi rural position so when there was a lot of water pouring off the garden it eventually ended up on the pavement then the road which as you can imagine not good during the winter.