“The village with the water under the houses”

Jim tells of the cisterns of Chipping Sodbury – the stone wells that are beneath several of the houses. Often mistaken for legendary Sodbury tunnels underneath people’s floors, Jim describes how in fact they are not and instead catch and store storm water.

“Now, one of the things that’s unusual for water conservation, in Chipping Sodbury, is a lot of the buildings have little cisterns, well actually quite big cisterns, in their gardens. There’s a big hole in the ground and they’re about ten feet long, eight feet wide and about six feet deep. They’re stone built, have a curved top and all the water that comes off the roof of the buildings goes into this tank, in the garden, during the winter. And then, when you need it, in the summer, it’s pumped out or dipped out. Even today, one friend of mine has a property with one of these, in his garden, and he’s got a semi rotary pump and he still uses this, to this day, to water his garden.

About three doors up, there’s a property where somebody came to me, one day, and said I’ve found something in my kitchen. The kitchen was an offshoot of the main house, with a flagstone floor. One of the flagstones had a ring in it and, when they lifted it up, there was water about six inches below that level, in the kitchen floor and about ten feet deep. He said, what’s this? I said, you’ve just found another cistern. Basically a well but collecting storm water.

The odd thing about a number of these cisterns is they’ve given rise to stories about tunnels of Sodbury. Because they’re an arched top and they’re about ten feet long, people go into them and think it’s a tunnel and they always say it’s been block off. But, of course, they weren’t tunnels at all. There are stories, actually written stories, about the tunnels of Sodbury but they’re not tunnels at all. They’re just a number of these underground cisterns.”