Well, well, well (or Water, water everywhere, nor any drop...)

We've had yet another roller-coaster few weeks. The well lining has indeed stabilised the shaft but it has reduced the volume of water to 1/9th of previous. We made a site visit in early May and talked to the site foreman, Joe, who'd been monitoring the re-fill rate. Peter did some calculations and worked out that the previous, vast reservoir which would have lasted us for about 4 weeks in drought conditions, has been lost. The re-fill rate from the ground source into the new, plastic-lined shaft has also been drastically reduced, so we can't rely on its refilling fast enough to provide more than a single day's domestic usage at a time. We were very cast down. However, about 100 metres away is another well, so we asked the well specialists to check its flow rate and send a sample for analysis. We knew it was a smaller well so the reserve would be less but it wouldn't need lining... We had the water analysis back last week and it is "unusable", with a pH of 9.6 , high levels of Aluminium, Ammonium and Calcium "off the scale", making it hard enough to fur up pipes in very short order.
This result is astonishing, from a water source within 100m of another which is slightly acidic, soft and un-contaminated. We've asked whether the anaysis returned may have been for a sample from somewhere else entirely, ie a lab mix-up.
There will be an answer (one or two options present themselves) but we will have to wait and see.
We're visiting the site in the second week of June, when we should have made a decision.

Anchoring and waterproofing

This is one of the concrete slices, cut deep across the hillside, to act as anchors, with its permanent shuttering.

The jumbled layers of rock , previously only glimpsed by torhlight, whilst peering down into the cavernous well shaft

By early May, the site had turned into a huge hole in the ground and the builders had created a relatively level plateau on which to work. It was hard to imagine, before we saw the process, how the house will be anchored in place but we are confident that it will stay put, having seen these deep concrete slices. The waterproofing is reassuring; it's a Ruberoid product and needs to be "signed off" by the company as being correctly applied and installed.