15th August, 1853.
The heat has baked the soil in the east meadow to the consistency of a poorly fired brick. Another week without rain, and I fear even the most stubborn thistles will surrender. A walk this afternoon to Mocker’s Creek confirmed my suspicions; it is reduced to a sad, muddy thread, barely enough to wet the bill of a thirsty blackbird. The sight threw my mind back nearly three decades to the far more severe drought of ‘26.
I was a young man then, newly returned from Cambridge and still possessed of a certain… practical energy. The summer of 1826 was relentless. The sun beat down upon Somerset for what seemed an eternity, and Mocker’s Creek had all but vanished, leaving behind a parched, cracked bed of clay, pocked with shallow, tepid pools where the last of its aquatic life was engaged in a frenetic and desperate struggle.
To see the newts (Lissotriton vulgaris) writhing in the dwindling moisture offended my sense of order. The local parish, I recall, was holding daily prayers for rain—a meteorological strategy I found to be of dubious efficacy. I decided upon a more direct, if modest, intervention.
Taking a gardener’s trowel and my own two hands, I spent the better part of an afternoon engaged in a small experiment in practical hydrology. Along the deepest part of the creek bed, where a vestigial trickle still persisted, I scooped out a series of modest reservoirs—no larger than a wash basin—and shored them up with dams of clay and pebbles. It was a crude business, but by evening, I had created a chain of perhaps a dozen small, connected pools, each holding a precious few inches of murky water.
The result was almost immediate. The newts and beleaguered frogs congregated in these new sanctuaries with what I could only interpret as relief. For several evenings I made it my business to observe my project. I saw not only the amphibians, but finches, voles, and on one occasion, as dusk settled, a fox—lank and thirsty—lapping cautiously from the largest of my pools.
It was not an act of sentimentality. I harboured no grand illusions of “saving” the local ecosystem. It was, rather, an attempt to introduce a pocket of logic into a world of chaotic indifference. There was a profound satisfaction in the act; a small correction against a larger, inexorable force. I found more sense in the integrity of a well-packed clay dam than in all the village’s entreaties to the heavens.
The pools themselves are long gone, of course, filled in by the silt of subsequent winters. But the memory of that small, useful act remains, clearer than the water it held.
Curator’s Note
Meteorological records indeed confirm Bennet’s memory of the 1826 drought; the Central England Temperature (CET) series marks it as one of the most severe of the 19th century, with widespread reports of dried-up rivers and agricultural distress. While the summer of 1853 was less extreme on a national scale, Bennet’s local observations are entirely consistent with regional dry spells of the period.
What makes this entry so compelling, however, is the glimpse it affords us of a younger Bennet, one whose philosophy was not yet confined to pure observation. His decision to intervene—not out of sentiment, but as an “attempt to introduce a pocket of logic into a world of chaotic indifference”—is a perfect encapsulation of his character. It is rationalism applied not with a pen, but with a trowel.
Furthermore, one cannot help but see this “experiment in practical hydrology” as a fascinating precursor to his later intellectual kinship with the Manchester engineer, Alaric Thorne. Bennet’s stated preference for the “integrity of a well-packed clay dam” over the “village’s entreaties to the heavens” is pure Thorne, expressed nearly two decades before their correspondence even began. It demonstrates that their shared worldview was not an accident of acquaintance, but a deep, structural alignment of their minds, destined to find each other across the intellectual landscape of England. - Dr. E. Reed