"In the days before service stations dispensed drink to mechanical vehicles the problem of watering horses was conveniently (and no doubt profitably) solved by roadside innkeepers, who placed a wooden, hand-filled water trough, or perhaps two water troughs, outside their premises. In the 1870s the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association began to establish, in Hertfordshire as elsewhere, large granite troughs linked to a permanent water supply, usually with a small ground-level trough for dogs and a push-button fountain for human beings. Only five of them are still to be found in the county - at Bushey, Hatfield, Potters Bar, Croxley Green and Rickmansworth - sometimes empty, occasionally filled with flowers, more often with litter. Nobody appears to set any value upon them; as relics of a transport age now utterly vanished are they not as worthy of attention and preservation as many more acknowledge ones?" So wrote Johnson in 1970 in "The Industrial Archaeology of Hertfordshire".
Lincolnshire
©Biff Vernon 2002