Water supply in a remote house in rural Norfolk, England in the early 1970s

Factual Questions
1

Yes, that’s kind of a specific topic to bring up, but I’m wondering about it because of the book I just finished. It’s not a recent book, but to avoid spoilering anybody I’ll avoid title/author details.

The book involves two story lines thirty years apart that echo each other. In both, a married woman is having an affair with a married man in what is described as country side, in a village so small there’s only a single place people can go out to eat. (The village is called “Stoke Tharby”, but I’d guess that’s an invented placename.) It’s in Norfolk, which I’m afraid doesn’t mean too much to me, and at one point a lead character describes the area as “beyond Breckland” and “in country we call the plow,” which means even less. Basically, outside of the village it seems to be farms with a few other houses scattered about.

This all matters because the main stories involves one of those houses, set by itself on a road without much traffic, and with apparently no other houses within a mile or more. It was secretly bought by the woman in the earlier story (Woman #1 hereafter) to provide a place for her and her lover to meet unobserved, and used by the woman in the other story (Woman #2) thirty years later for the same purpose.

It’s an ‘ordinary’ size house I’d say, with kitchen and lounge downstairs, and three bedrooms upstairs. The outside of the house is covered in flint stones, though I’m not sure if the stones are what the walls are basically composed of or if they’re a surface layer set into some matrix, like a tile mosaic.

The love affair in Story 1 comes to a bad ending. Woman #1 walks out of that house, leaving everything – furniture, some clothes in the closet, some food in the kitchen – and never sets foot in it again. NO ONE does, the book is clear about that. The house is left empty, totally ignored, other than Woman #1 continues to pay the property tax/rates?

Thirty years later she is old and dying, now living in some large house that has been converted to a sort of nice Old Age Care Home. Woman #2 is her assigned ‘carer.’ and over the months they become close. Woman #1 gives Woman #2 the key to the house and asks her to go check on it, see what state it is in.

Which turns out to be absolutely fine. It’s full of decades of accumulated dust, but the walls are solid, the windows are unbroken, the roof doesn’t leak, no one has broken in to squat or steal or trash the place. Eventually woman #2 cleans up the place, and starts using it as a place for her and her lover to tryst.

That ‘cleaning up’ is what bothers me. Yes, I’m totally dubious that the house is in such mechanically perfect condition after being left empty and unheated and unlooked after for three decades, but somehow what really nags is that Woman #2 is able to just turn on a tap and have water flow out. Yes, it’s described as a trickle, and it’s discolored a bit, but there’s enough of it for her to clean up several rooms at least over the course of a few days.

Where would the house’s water come from? It’s such a remote, isolated setting I find it hard to believe it would be on some sort of ‘municipal’ water supply system. And if it were, wouldn’t Woman #1 have also have to have being paying water bills? At least here there’s a minimum charge, even if you never use so much as a glass of water.

So it’s probably got to be supplied by a well – but in my super limited experience, water just stays down in wells due to something called gravity, unless forced up by pumps, and what is driving those pumps?

It’s explicitly stated that the house has no electric service at that time. Woman #2 is forever bringing in and lighting candles for light during their meetings, and later on she actively calls and has electricity ‘turned on’ at the house. I’ve heard of wind powered water pumps, is that a possibility? Some other option I’m overlooking?

Otherwise I’m having to fall back on the water pumps running on Plot Necessitarium. :frowning:

Edited to add: I just realized it’s not clear. The 70s were when the earlier story happens, the second story might be in the, um, aughts?

2

Short answer- Artesian well

3

Or a spring up on the hill.

4

It’s fiction. It doesn’t happen in real life.

5

Agree with a previous post of an artesian well, or maybe a upstairs cistern that collected rain water?

6

Yeah, I guess the spigot was made of some magical material that didn’t corrode shut or leak after 30 years of just sitting there.

7

I was a caretaker at a turn-of the-century estate on the coast of Maine, and the water there was originally gravity fed from a spring on a hill, and piped down to the buildings.

8

Oh, good answers! I can accept either to turn off that nagging voice in mind. :slight_smile: Of course, probably either wouldn’t work perfectly for thirty years of no maintenance. I think? But OTOH those Romans dug tunnels and built aquaducts and all and they worked long, long after Rome fell, so maybe?

9

Water? Sure. Working tap? No way.

10

Just a little tip: when trying to avoid spoilers, as promised, don’t put clues like these in. They are distinctive enough to ruin a perfectly good book when I pick it up off the library shelf. Just saying​:upside_down_face::books::open_book: Now you owe me a good book with an intriguing setting and plot. /s

11

I wouldn’t call thise spoilers - he(?) did say it’s in Norfolk.

12

I know. I hate those Sue Grafton books. They give away the whole plot right in the title.

13

Brass tap - quite possible, but in a gravity-fed water supply there would need to be an intermediate stop-cock or tap before the water reached the interior of the house.
Otherwise if the tap was left open it would channel all the water from the tank/reservoir/spring/river straight into the bathroom. That would be funny.

14

Well, maybe.

I’d expect brass fittings and copper plumbing in a decently built 1970’s house in the USA, anyway. They’re not likely to rust.

I don’t generally turn off the shutoff valves in the basement unless something’s wrong with the line past the valve, or something’s being worked on; so they’re often not shut off for several years, but generally seem to work fine.

I don’t think the main shutoff valve on the entrance line was shut off for many years inbetween work being needed on the holding tank. Wasn’t thirty years, I don’t think, but might easily have been fifteen or more. Worked when we needed it.

As far as the roof goes, that probably depends on how old it was at the start of the 30 years, what it was made out of, and whether anything sizeable could fall on it. Window glass is partly luck – I’ve got panes of glass that are probably over a hundred years old, but others have needed replacement.

I’m more dubious that no creatures managed to get in. If it’s really good quality stone or brick construction, though, and not a fieldstone basement (cracks in which would probably get enlarged by weather and critters, at least enough for mice and rats to get in), then again, maybe. Plus which, of course, if there was nothing inside for them to eat there’d be less impulse to get in; though human houses still make nice weather shelters for all sorts of creatures.

15

I suppose the tap could be new and all the pipes up to the water source in good enough shape not to have leaked.

The rest of the condition ties in to the common fiction that long abandoned houses remain in perfect condition. The faucets always provide a trickle of water. There will be a few cob webs right inside the front door but the rest of the place hasn’t been disturbed by any wildlife, the roof doesn’t leak, there may be functional oil lamps out on tables or sometimes the electricity even works. Some perfectly good logs with no sign of decay sit right in front of the fireplace. There may be food left in the cabinets, the furniture is fine, there are likely some blankets. Oddly though, the phone never works. You can pick up the receiver and tap on the hook switch several times but there will be no dial tone and you realize the lines must be down even though you still find nothing unusual about finding this long neglected structure in perfect condition.

16

OP said Norfolk - it’s mostly low-lying land, and probably not much likelihood of an artesian well.

From a practical perspective, at the time the house would have probably had a header tank in the roof space. but this would have either dried up (if the water was off), or rusted out (if the water was still on). If it was on a municipal water supply (which seems unlikely for a rural location), then that may have been covered by the council tax. But still OK after thirty years of no maintenance is pretty hard to believe, as is the total failure of anyone breaking in or raising queries about ownership.

Put it this way, if someone had moved on to the property and maintained the grounds after the owner moved out, they could have claimed the property (by squatters rights) after ten or twelve years.

17

In 2010 the pipes might have burst, nonferrous piping and I’d suspect enough cold or temp variation in a gravity fed system would have water flowing(in all the wrong places). With ferrous piping maybe the same or maybe rusted shut or clogged.

18

toforGuest

(Water supply in a remote house in rural Norfolk, England in the early 1970s - #3 by tofor)

“Or a spring up on the hill.”

I only really know Norfolk from TV and geography, but it’s flat and somewhat marshy; the famous Norfolk Broads are drainage channels.

About the house: " flintstones in Norfolk? Definitely imported, you find flint in chalk areas such as the South Downs. Where are they? Sussex? Sussex, as in the Duchy. South east coast. Norfolk is geologically alluvial.

I do wonder if the author is American. Outside of the high moorland areas, such as the Pennines and near the Scottish border, you just will not find houses that are really remote. Not in Norfolk, it’s a farming area. So you will get mains electricity and generally mains water as well. A very remote area might have a well, but that needs a pump and some maintenance to prevent it from clogging up.

There was a series about what would happen to thee world if man disappeared overnight It is startling how soon everything that is man-made falls apart and gets overgrown if nobody is around. In buildings, the windows break, the frames fall, out and the roof collapses. That can happen quite quickly.

In WW2 the British government evacuated a village near Lulworth Cove in Dorsey to use it as a firing range. They still do; it is about the only place in the UK where they can fire tank guns without endangering somebody. The abandoned houses are ruined. Part of the damage was done by rabbits, of all things, burrowing underground.

In short, a house left derelict for thirty years would be unusable without a lot of work.

19

Grime’s Graves, the famous neolithic flint mine, in Norfolk.

20

I’m thinking possibly lead piping for a 70s house. Which also wouldn’t rust, presumably. We had lead in Scotland still in the 80s

(I would have quoted your first para if I could. Quoting appears to be screwy on a tablet (?))