WE are casual enough about water, in a world that is beginning to realise its value. Did you see that in England they are thinking of having to import water from France through the Channel Tunnel, if we get a summer like the last one?
Nearer home, a photograph of last year turned up the other day showing one of the tributaries of the Boyne, with a section nearly grassed over. This is a result of the arterial drainage scheme on this river system, done nearly a decade and a half ago. Yet, in winter, the water runs bank high. And was much land gained by the whole operation? The fish have not recovered.
Dublin has its troubles. Something like fifty per cent of the water is lost through old pipes. Not a thing that could easily be anticipated, you might think. And parts of the country are regularly in need of water and water schemes. We get rain most of the year. We don't know how to handle it. And, believe it or not, the Manchester Meteorological Office has said that its region is suffering the worst drought for 300 years. Here at home, if you live by your own bore hole, you wonder how the ground water is going to hold out.
Trees and water, now there's a subject. Have we not all heard that where there is now Sahara sand, there once stood forests?. Once the trees were gone, the land dried up. Old Gilbert White of Selbourne, the curate with the ever inquiring mind, has views of trees and water. Deciduous trees. They were, he said, in heavy fogs, on elevated situations especially, perfect alembics.
"And no one that has not attended to such matters can imagine how much water one tree will distill in a night's time, by condensing the vapour, which trickled down the twigs and boughs, so as to make the ground below quite in a float. In Newtown Lane, in October 1775, on a misty day, a particular oak in leaf dropped so fast that the cartway stood in puddles and the ruts ran with water, though the ground in general was dusty. He understood that in certain small islands in the West Indies ("if I mistake not"), there were no springs or rivers, but the people were supplied with water merely by the dripping of some tall, large trees, which standing "in the bosom of a mountain, keep their heads constantly enveloped with fogs and clouds . . . and so render those districts habitable by condensation alone."
Of one thing he was sure: "Deciduous trees that are entwined with much ivy seem to distill the greatest quantity." A good word for ivy.