HISTORY OF COLCHESTER CORPORATION WATER WORKS. 23 
sewers were laid. Owing to the advance of medical and sanitary 
science, and the increased knowledge of zymotic and other 
water-borne diseases, these springs, which rise or flow under the 
present inhabited town, were finally abandoned for domestic 
use in 1890, but are still retained for non-domestic purposes, for 
supplying the locomotives, &c., at Colchester station. They 
include the springs in the neighbourhood of the water works 
yard, viz., Clark’s Meadow Spring and the Sheepen Spring, to be 
hereafter referred to. The spring in the railway cutting already 
mentioned is not at present utilized. 
In or about the year i860, the late Mr. Peter Bruff discovered 
the existence of a very strong gravel spring just south of Sheepen 
Farm on the south side of the valley, from the same plateau 
of gravel which is also thrown out by the London-clay. This was 
brought home by him to the Balkern Hill Works, to supplement 
the then existing spring supply, but in or about 1880, by the 
advice of the Corporation’s Consulting Engineer, the late Mr. 
Edward Easton, the spring was abandoned, and immediately 
taken possession of to supply Colchester Station by the G.E. 
Railway. As it did not yield sufficient water for their purpose, 
it was given up a few years later. Through the foresight of Mr. 
Bland, it is again in possession of the Corporation. In 1905, I 
had the pleasure of bringing it home to Balkern Hill for the 
second time, to supplement the non-domestic supply. It is 
reported to have yielded some 100,000 gallons per day in Dec. 
1879, but in the summer of 1904 the yield was about 70,000 
gallons, but in this case, as in the case of all these gravel 
springs, the yield varies as the rainfall. 
In 1850, to supplement the then existing spring supply, the 
late Mr. Bruff, who was engineer and part owner of the water 
works, conceived the idea of sinking a well into the clay, and 
boring through the Woolwich and Reading beds, and Thanet 
Sands, into the chalk formation ; so important did he consider 
the work at the time, that he communicated a paper thereon to 
the Institute of Civil Engineers, in 1859 (vol. xix., pp. 38 and 39), 
and which was one of the early papers on water works read before 
that Society. Particulars of this well and bore hole have since 
been extracted therefrom, and reported in the Geological Memoir 
Colchester (1880) by Mr. W. H. Dalton and Mr. Whitaker, 
wherein it is stated that the rest level of. the water was five feet 
