Four taps on one spur, and the spur has its own meter because the water company made us fit one. The field has been shut for six years and the meter has turned every summer since.
I am the site manager on a hundred and forty pitch caravan site. Been there since 2011 and I look after everything that is not the shop.
Water first, because the whole of this is water.
We are on the mains and there is a company meter at the entrance. Inside the site the supply splits into five spurs, one per field plus one for the toilet blocks, and each spur has its own meter in a box at the head of it. That was not our idea. We had a leak in 2014 that cost nine thousand pounds before anybody found it, and the water company made sub-metering a condition of the variation on our supply.
The meters are simple mechanical ones with a dial, read monthly, written on a clipboard sheet that lives in the box. I have done that reading myself for eleven years on the first Monday of the month.
The point of reading them is that a spur with nobody on it should not move.
The top field is the spur that should not move.
We closed it in 2019. Not for a season, for good. It is the furthest field, it is on a slope that got worse every year, the drainage was failing and the access track would have needed twenty thousand spent on it. So we took the thirty pitches off the plan, took the hook-up posts out, turned the field over to hay for the farmer next door, and put a gate on the track with a chain on it.
What we did not do is dig up the water. There are four standpipes in that field on a buried spur and digging them out means digging up the field, and the field is the farmer's hay now.
So the spur was isolated instead, at the head, at a valve in the meter box, and the valve was shut, and I shut it myself on the 14th of October 2019, and I wrote it on the sheet.
Between May and September of 2020, the top field meter turned two thousand one hundred and forty litres.
2021: two thousand three hundred. 2022: just under two thousand. 2023, 2024 and last year the same. Eleven thousand three hundred litres in total, all of it between May and September, none of it in winter.
Two thousand litres over five months is about thirteen litres a day, which is somebody filling a couple of jerry cans.
The valve is shut. It has been shut every single time I have looked, and I look on the first Monday of the month, and since 2021 I have looked weekly in the summer, and since 2022 I have taken a photograph of the valve handle with the date on the phone.
A shut valve with water going through it is not impossible. A gate valve can fail, the gate can come off the stem, and the handle will be in the shut position while the valve is wide open. That is a known failure and any plumber will tell you about it.
So in 2022 we replaced the valve with a lever type quarter turn ball valve, which cannot do that, because the handle is on the same piece of metal as the ball. Shut is shut and you can see it.
2023: one thousand nine hundred and eighty litres.
The other thing a plumber will tell you is that a meter can turn without water, from air. Air in a pipe drives a mechanical meter and an air slug can register as litres.
That is real. It is also seasonal in the wrong direction: air gets into a system when it is drained and refilled, which is spring and autumn, not steadily across five months.
And we tested it, in the simplest way available. In 2023 I broke the spur open downstream of the valve at the meter box and left it open to atmosphere for the whole of June and July, with the valve shut upstream and the end of the pipe in a bucket in the box.
The bucket stayed dry.
The meter turned four hundred and ten litres.
The standpipes themselves.
They are in the hay now. Two of them you can find by looking, the other two you have to know where to go. They are the usual thing: a galvanised riser out of the ground with a bib tap on it and a concrete pad.
In the August of 2021 I walked up there with a bag of four brass caps and a wrench and I took the handle off every tap and capped every outlet, which is a ten minute job and which I should have done in 2019.
The meter turned one thousand six hundred litres after that.
Capped. I have been back and checked the caps every year and they are on and they are tight and two of them have moss on them now.
The farmer.
He would be welcome to the water and I told him so in 2019, and he said he had his own and he did, a borehole, which I have seen.
He is the one who said the thing I cannot get out of my head, and he said it in about 2022, leaning on the gate, when I was up there with the wrench for the third time.
He asked what I was doing and I said there was a leak somewhere on the old spur, and he said, without any weight on it at all, that he put the first cut off that field a fortnight later than the rest because the bottom corner always takes longer to dry.
I asked why it would be wetter and he said he had no idea, it just was, and that his father had said the same and had put it down to a spring.
There is no spring. I have had the borehole logs and the geology and there is no spring in that field and the water company's own mapping does not show one.
What I do now is read the meter and write the number down, and at the end of the season I put the total on a line in the annual water reconciliation called unaccounted, which is a real category that every metered site has, because water disappears and the number is never zero.
Eleven thousand litres across six years costs me about thirty pounds a year and I am not going to dig up a field for it.
The only thing I have changed is that I no longer go up in the evening.
The last time I did was in the July two years ago, reading the box at about nine because I had forgotten it that morning, and the box is at the head of the track with the gate beside it, and I had the torch on the dial.
I could hear the meter. A mechanical meter makes a very faint tick when it is turning and you have to be close and it has to be quiet, and it was both, and I stood there with my hand on the lid listening to it tick with the valve shut under my thumb and the whole field dark and flat in front of me.
It stopped while I was listening. Not a fade. It stopped, the way a tap stops.
And I had the torch and I did not put it up, and I have been going in the mornings ever since.