284 The Vale of Warminster. 
Deverill that runs under ground.” The gentlemen of Longbridge 
Deverel and Maiden Bradley were clearly not of very inquiring 
minds in those days. 
It is difficult sometimes to get at the precise fact in a matter 
which, nevertheless, everybody talks of as a fact. I have often 
asked of gentlemen who have liberty to whip the water of the 
Deverel for trout, whether they ever observed the trout suddenly 
disappear into the earth, because in that case they might have noticed 
that the water vanished also, but they had never met with such in- 
terruption to sport. Nothing of the kind certainly occurs in those 
four out of the five Deverel parishes that lie nearest to Warminster. 
Upon further inquiry it turned out that, if anywhere, this diving 
rill must be looked for before it reaches Kingston Deverel. So I 
went one day to Kingston Deverel, and enquired on the very spot, 
whether the rivulet dived. Of two gentlemen whom I met, be- 
longing to the parish, and who had lived in it a good many years, 
one said he thought it did, and the other doubted it. I was shown 
the place just above Kingston Deverel where a little stream certainly 
~ comes out of the ground, and was told that the place where it is 
supposed to go in was two or three miles off; so next day I went 
there. On the road from Maiden Bradley to Stourhead, about one 
mile or so out of Maiden Bradley, at a hamlet called Norton Ferrers, 
a lane on your right hand comes down from Kilmington, and in it 
is a little stream, which crosses the turnpike road through a culvert 
and fills a pond in a field close to the road.! There is no visible 
outlet of water from that pond, and as the stream is always running 
in, it must run out somehow, and certainly under ground. A man 
who showed me the place told me there was no doubt it went under 
ground and came out at Kingston Deverel, and seemed surprised 
when I asked him how he could be quite sure, because it might run 
anywhere else. “Oh,” said he, “they did put in a duck—same as 
at Bonham” [a place near Stourhead, where I suppose there is 
1 It is called ‘* Blackwell Spring,” and lies just within the county of Somerset. : 
It is one of three sources of water, very near together, which run in wholly 
different directions. This, to Salisbury. A second, the Avon, to Bath and 
Bristol. The third, the Stour, into Dorsetshire. 
