I am suddenly reminded of St Eanswyth of Folkestone, who, I was taught, drove her crozier into a spring some miles from her abbey, and drew it along the ground, the water following her, including going down the side of a valley, across the stream at the bottom and up the other side before continuing to the abbey. I was shown the pond it fed, and told the miracle was still working.

Which it wasn't, because the aqueduct had been cut some years before, and I saw where the water fell down from a channel like a mill leat into the little stream below. (Didn't know that was what I was looking at at the time - and it's all hidden, now.) The water had run down the aqueduct from early Saxon times until about 1900, supplying the town, and probably the teacher who showed me was alive when it was running, before the water company put the supply into pipes.

It was a very sophisticated piece of surveying and engineering for a teenage Saxon princess (even if it does not include a reverse siphon), but doesn't help Bobert, as he needs to move the water uphill, and not along a contour. Ram or pump, he needs. Or a bucket chain on a cable run like a ski lift, which he could operate with pedals like a bicycle. (Meccano had a mock up of this sort of thing called a Telfer. Minus bike drive.) (Some ancient relation of mine had a Telfer from his chalk pit to the nearby creek.)

Penny