Creekside Warfleet
01803-833881
From:
Dartmouth History Research Group
The Editor
Kingsbridge. 12/5/2006
Dear Sir,
I enclose an article about the water
supply in Southtown,
Would you please return the article, with photographs, when you have finished with them?
Yours sincerely,
Ray Freeman
WHEN WATER WAS PRECIOUS.
Have you ever stopped to think when you turned on a tap, which produces instant cold and even hot water, how lucky you are to live in the 21st century? Only a hundred years ago in Dartmouth most people did not have running water piped into their homes, and they had to fetch it in buckets from ‘conduits’ (stone water tanks) in the street for drinking, cooking, or washing.
In the Parish of St. Petrox these conduits were provided as a charity for the people by a group known as “feoffees,” - pronounced “fee-oh- fees,” a word meaning what we would call Trustees, and inscriptions marking where they were can still be seen in Southtown and Bayards Cove. One in Southtown reads:
F St P (Feoffees of St. Petrox)
1511
1792
1897
Once there was a stone conduit in the road there, with a tap from which water could be taken, and the dates record when this was repaired or altered. In 1897 for instance the stone cistern was removed to widen the pavement, and a water tank was fixed inside the ground floor room adjoining the road where it formed part of the living room of the lady who lived there until late in the 20th century.
The earliest records to survive go back to the beginning of the fifteenth century, when property was given to the Feoffees the income from which was to pay for providing and maintaining the water supply for the inhabitants. For nearly six hundred years the feoffees quietly did their job, with new ones being appointed as old ones died off. The water came down the steep-sided hills from springs, where it was caught, enclosed in conduits, and led in pipes downhill towards where people lived with further conduits at intervals. One source of water was called Blackmans Well, a spring which came out of a rock in the triangular space between Above Town and Southtown. This is now in a private garden, but the water still flows strongly down onto the pavement below, where a stone with the initials of the Feoffees of St. Petrox marks where a conduit once stood. Now the water is led away into today’s surface water drains.
In the 18th and 19th centuries more
houses were built in Southtown and the demand for water grew. A new source of water was provided in 1836
from Coombe Meadow and another field adjoining it in Stoke Fleming parish - up
On Bayards Cove, where at one time the slip from the Lower Ferry from Kingswear was on the south side of Island House - one of the Feoffees’ properties, - a conduit was placed nearby. However, at the request of the inhabitants the conduit was moved in 1857 to its present position opposite to the Dartmouth Arms.
Even in the twentieth century many older residents in Southtown who remembered the conduit water said they thought it “tasted better” than the tap water provided by the water company. However, once it had been proved in the mid-nineteenth century that diseases such as typhoid and cholera were being spread in water pipes, the days of these private supplies was numbered and people learnt to be grateful if anti-bacterial chemicals were added to their water.
What do the Feoffees do in these days when
there is no need to provide the inhabitants with water? There are now eight Trustees of St.
Petrox, four nominated by
Water conduit at
Water conduit moved to its present site at Bayards Cove in 1857.