09 January 2003 Springs And Fairy Thorns I keep getting hits for Ballygowan Mineral Water on this site. Ironically I only drink Ballygowan if I'm in a bar or restaurant. At home it's always Evian. Tap water just doesn't cut it for me. I can't drink the muck and I think the reason for that is because I never lived in a house with ordinary tap water until I was in my late teens. I've mentioned before that my step-dad owned a farm, well we lived in a huge old farmhouse that never had been plumbed for running water. Seriously, all our freshwater was brought to the house from a spring in a nearby field. There was a large tank contraption on the roof which caught and filtered rainwater which we used for washing, but all our drinking water came from the spring. That spring had the coolest, freshest water you'd ever taste and it never went dry - even during the drought of the mid 70s. There was a Fairy Thorn growing beside it as well. I've no idea how old either tree or spring were, but my dad was born in 1913 and both tree and spring were in place when his father was a young man. Dad point blank refused to have any other water plumbed in. His reasoning was that the local reservoir for the district was situated in hills where a lot of sheep were raised. According to him you might as well just drink sheep's piss :-D When we sold the farm and moved, one of the prime considerations of the house-hunting was to find somewhere with a well or spring and we did. Our new house had a well, although it was rather more modern in that the water was pumped into a tank in the house. A number of years later we finally got 'council water' as we call it plumbed in, but kept a tap coming from the well for our drinking water. So I guess that's why you'll always find a bottle of mineral water in my fridge. At a push I'd only drink tap water if it was filtered or boiled first. As for the spring and the Fairy Thorn.....well, the people who bought our farm had scant respect for tradition and uprooted the tree. Funnily enough the entire field flooded after they did it and we heard they had to spend a fortune on a drainage system before they were ever able to use it again.
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