The Spring.
A spring line where the limestone meets the clay, a stone trough, and the only reliable water on the holding that did not arrive in a pipe. It is also the reason there has been a farm on this spot for a very long time.
- At
- 1.9 miles
- Cost to run
- Nothing
- Recorded failures
- None
What is here.
Water comes out of a hillside where a permeable layer sits on an impermeable one. On the Cotswolds that means limestone over clay, and it means the spring line is roughly where every old settlement in the county is.
The trough is Victorian, cracked, and still works. It fills at a rate that would not impress anybody with a mains supply and has never once stopped, including in the summer of 2022 and the spring of 2025.
It is worth standing here for a moment because it is the one piece of infrastructure on this farm that costs nothing to run, needs nothing doing to it, and predates everybody. There is not much else on the estate you can say that about.
What happened here.
Every farm on this soil was sited by water before it was sited by anything else. The road came later, the buildings came later, and the field boundaries came very much later.
In the 2025 drought, when the wheat was thirty per cent down and the durum was under two tonnes a hectare, the spring kept running. It is a useful corrective to the idea that a dry year means there is no water — there is water, it is simply not where the roots are.
- At
- 1.9 miles
- Cost to run
- Nothing
- Recorded failures
- None
What it costs to keep.
The Spring
- To run
- NothingIt has never been metered and never will be.
- The trough
- VictorianCracked, repaired once, still filling.
- Failures on record
- NoneIncluding 2022 and 2025.
- What it supplies
- Stock water, one fieldWhich in a dry August is not nothing.
Costs are indicative ranges for work of this kind in this part of the country, not invoices. Where a figure is a published estate number rather than a general one, it says so in the row.
What to look at, while you are here.
The outflow
Steady, unimpressive, and utterly reliable.
The flush
The wet ground below it grows things nothing else on this farm grows.
The stonework
Older than the ownership, and probably older than the field boundary.
The temperature
It comes out at about ten degrees all year. That is the definition of a spring.
The Spring, in the season it looks best. It does not look like this in February, and the walk changes plates when the real season at OX7 does.
Further along.
The Woods
A few acres of mixed woodland at the edge of the holding. It produces mushrooms, wild garlic, firewood and, at…
The Unfarmed
Margins, hedges, woodland edge and the corners a combine cannot reach. Under conventional management this is waste ground. On the…
The Bees
Six hives on the south edge of the wildflower ground. They produce honey which is sold as Bee Juice at…
The Lambing Shed
Four pens, a creep, a heat lamp and a camera. For six weeks in spring it is the most watched…
Watch this bit live instead.
There is a camera on or near this stop, running all year, with no audio and no zoom.
