Aspects of Kentish Local History

FROM the Plough Inn at Ivy Hatch in the parish of Ightham a way known as the Coach Road runs a little west of north to Seven Wents, where it joins the Maidstone-Sevenoaks main road under the south end of Oldbury Hill. On the west side of this way, 350 yards from the inn, stands a small house called the Pump House, a name that is much older than the existing dwelling. Half a furlong north of the Pump House, on the same side of the way, the grass verge widens into a triangular recess, some twenty-five yards long and one-third as deep, backed by a bank. The writer and other local residents remember a bricked archway in the bank giving access to a wayside spring, which had been hollowed out to form a dripping well. This spring occurs at the outcrop of the Sandgate Beds. Before main water was available the occupiers of neighbouring dwellings drew their water from the well, but the site has been used for many years as a dump for road material, and the archway is now obscured by soil and vegetation.
   Evidence has recently come to light that the spring served a wider purpose than that of a water supply for the immediate locality.
   Among the estate maps of John Bowra is one made in 

1765 of "Merryman's Farm ...... belonging to John Children, Esqr. ........" which "shows the site of the Pump House and traces the course of a conduit which runs from it across the farm."¹ The pipe is marked as running from the spring (D on the map) in a south-easterly direction across four fields --- The Moors, Doll Field, Windmill Field and Old Mead --- and thence beyond the limits of the farm. A branch pipe ran from the spring in a curving southerly course to a pump house (A). Between D and A, a little west of the line of the branch pipe, were two wells, C and B.
   Points marked on the line of the main pipe are as follows:
      E. "Where waste plug takes out."
      F and G (Posts). "Where pipes come."
      H. "The Cistern."
      I. "The Air pipe."
      K. "here the pipe goes a Cross" --- that is, across land outside the bounds of Merryman's Farm.
   Between F and G is a point marked "for the use of Ivy Hatch street."
   ¹  Arch. Cant., LIII, 139.