Technology and the Big House in Ireland, c. 1800

Technology and the Big House in Ireland, c. 1800–c.1930 By Charl ...

Chapter 1:

Water Supplies

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and surface seepage, however, could enter the pool, and there was the possibility of contamination by animals drinking there. This problem could be avoided, in many cases, by building a roofed structure, a “water house”, over the pool. A less expensive supply system was to simply fill buckets at the outlet of the spring and carry them to the house. David Thomson, writing about his experiences at Woodbrook, County Roscommon, described the business of obtaining drinking water as follows:

In my later years at Woodbrook, I often fetched water from the well [spring] in the two white enamelled buckets that were used for nothing else. They held two gallons each—enough for cooking and drinking water for a day—but once a week, when Winnie was churning, an extra journey had to be made for water to wash the butter with. The full buckets were too heavy for me, though not for the other men, to carry the whole way back without a rest.²⁵

The use of buckets to bring spring or well water to the house seems to have sufficed for the small quantities required at Woodbrook for the kitchen and dairy. At Birr Castle, County Offaly, which was four stories high, rather than carry water through corridors and up staircases to the upper floors, large volumes of water were raised externally by a hoist in the 1850s. The fourth Lord Rosse, in some notes of his early memories of his father's time, described the water supply as follows:

[T]he supply to the top of the castle was principally from a pump some 30 or 40 feet deep in the stable yard into a rainwater tank near the back door whence it was lifted—the whole thing by hand power—to the top of the castle.²⁶

Above the top door in plate 7 is the bracket and pulley for the hoist. The same hoist was also used to raise turf supplies to all floors of the castle, and its mechanism is illustrated in plate 25 in the following chapter. Apart from drinking water, the general water supply at Birr Castle—as at other big houses—was primarily rainwater, any deficiency of supply having to be made up of well water from the stable yard pump. Using this hoist system removed the need to frequently carry water to the upper floors in