Sometimes the more you know, the more you realize how little you actually know.
Through all the years of living on the farm, discovering new things on the land is not very uncommon, normally that would be finding some old buried tools while trenching, or stumbling across a strange rock formation that you haven't seen before. But when you stumble across an abandoned water well that hasn't been documented anywhere, you start to wonder about how well you know the land that you live on.
While clearing out big sections throughout the farm in the process to open up roads, eradicate invasive plants and repair fencing, I literally stumbled across an abandoned water well, I went back to the farms old documentation, but i couldn't find any log of this well registered anywhere. Which is strange, because throughout the years all the infrastructure on the farm had been very well documented.
The problem is now, figuring out why this well was abandoned in the first place. It could be that the well dried up, or that the well work broke off inside the pump. But if I look at the structures around the well I would say that at some point this well was definitely being drilled, because the well is rigged with a cement slab and a casing for the pump.
Besides the well was also another cement block with a steel frame of sorts put into place to stand the pump motor on. These are not the kind of things you do when you have drilled an empty well.
Back in the day farmers often made use of metal pipes or 'worms' as we call them to drop down into the wells in order to pump water up, the problem with this was that the metal could rust and become brittle and sometimes if left in that condition to long, the worm along with the water pump connected to the bottom of it could end up staying behind in the well when an attempt was made to pull it out, thus blocking the well. Generally here wells from about 60m but can easily go as deep as 240m, so you can imagine pulling dead weight metal cores with a heavy pump attached to the bottom of it with little to no spare room to work in, is not the easiest of tasks.
With more modern equipment such tasks have become more doable. and if we can determine if this well still holds water, or is dried up. It might be worth out while to clear it out and rig it with a more sustainable pump and worm.
Firs we will need to drop weights down the shaft to determine the depth of the well that is open, then we will need to drop down a strong magnet in order to check if the base found is a metal obstruction, during that process also see if we found any water at the depth that we could reach.
Sometimes obstructions in old wells could also be termite nesting that plasters up the hole. once we know what we are dealing with, we can proceed in trying to figure out how to get the hole open...
My lovely farm assistant named Jakkals agrees that we should definitely take the time to look into this...
The more you know the less you know.... we also found an abandoned borehole. Didn't quite take us as long as you though! About a year after we arrived. I wonder if it was abandoned because it wasn't deep enough? Or by the looks of the trees maybe roots interfered? Now I'm curious for you to find out @breezin