THE WATER TROUGH
When the bends are taken out of the roads, as they have been to a much greater extent these few years past, the milestones are resited and, presumably, X becomes nearer Y to the extent to which the paths of the old cattle drovers have been straightened out. Whether this is a good thing or not, from the point of view of road casualties, one aspect of the tidying- up seems to me to be that the old watering places, used by carters and the owners of ponies in the days of more leisurely progress, have been filled in or removed. Some of these took the form of troughs set in the bank beneath a spouting drain. Others were slab-blocked streamlets to which the road gave access in a sort of cut-back. Many hundreds of these stopping-places have disappeared, for there is no need for them now, despite petrol rationing. Long ago they were of importance to the traveller who could not leave the highway to water his mare without adding considerably to his journey. My own fond memory of them is a childhood one of green summer and nodding harebells as the pony stood and slaked an incredible thirst with what now seems gallons of cold spring water. Like the horse trough, once common in towns, there is no place (and no time) for them on the modern highway.
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