Captain’s Wood Water Tower
Saturday. Sunny with clear blue skies in the morning, perfect for a morning walk along the lanes. I took this photo on the way: the old water tower tucked into Captain's Wood on Singledge Lane has been a feature of this stretch of the North Downs for well over a century. Built around 1906, it sits on the chalk ridge at just the right elevation to do its job without any mechanical assistance—the position was the whole point, with gravity doing the work of distributing water to the settlements below. The structure itself is a circular brick wall, about 12 metres tall and half a metre thick, with a steel water tank inside, supported on steel beams. It has been derelict for many decades, and the roof came down in a storm in early 2022, leaving the interior fully exposed to the elements. The steel tank is now corroded and partly collapsed, though the brickwork itself is in better shape than you might expect from a building that has been left to its own devices for so long. It has attracted a couple of planning applications for residential conversion, most recently in 2024, so it may yet find a new life. It's a satisfyingly solid piece of Edwardian engineering, even in its current state, and it remains one of the more quietly atmospheric things you can stumble across on a walk along this part of the lane.
By late morning, dark clouds loomed on the horizon, leading to hail and heavy rain for several hours. Lots of to-ing and fro-ing: Dash & Monty went out early to hit the gym. Milo was working in the morning, then he and Monty went to Canterbury to get haircuts. Dash went to Whitstable to hang out with his friends at the skateboard park—I went to pick him up from Chestfield around 8 pm. Spinach & Ricotta Tortelloni for supper. Monty is planning his next set of travels with Kenadee for later this year—just blue-sky thinking at this stage, but interesting nonetheless. He has been setting up a website to document their adventures, using Perplexity Computer (the new agentic functionality of the service), and the results were incredible—I definitely had one of those ‘sci-fi’ moments. No doubt, there’s a lot of lazy AI-generated rubbish out there, but the laziness comes from the people producing it, brains in neutral, just wanting a quick fix. A proper partnership, with humans and AI genuinely working together, will be able to achieve amazing things. </soapbox>
