The Monday Photo

This village pump is on a bend on the High Street at Nash. It’s one of two in the village; the other example is on Winslow Road, not far from the village pond.

Neither pump has a maker’s name, so they can’t easily be dated. But the pumps were certainly in use in the early 1900s, when villagers would fetch water with buckets, suspended from a yoke carried on their shoulders.

This pump is probably older. There were many makers of village pumps; many of them starting to manufacture them in the mid 19th Century.

Part of the industrial revolution, they used the new mass production techniques to improve lives, and in this case they filled the universal need for clean accessable water.

The pump still works, though it has a plaque warning that the water is unfit for drinking. Whether this is because the water has changed, or it’s just a precaution, I cannot tell.

Mains water came to North Bucks in the 1930s and I expect this is when these pumps fell out of use.

There are pumps at Quainton, North Marston (complete with a devil in a boot) and at Oving, amongst other places in North Bucks.