This is the second in our series of caches in honour of the cult film ''The life of Brian'' based on the People's Front of Judea's bumbling antic's of trying to undermine the might of the Roman Empire..!!
We will be hopefully placing all the things named in the ''what have the Romans ever done for us'' scene in modern day appropriate places.
You will be standing just metres from the Vyrnwy Aquaduct....running beneath your feet..!!
The 110km Vyrnwy Aqueduct takes a water supply from manmade Lake Vyrnwy in north Wales north-eastwards to the city of Liverpool. When completed, it was the longest aqueduct in the world. Over the years, it has been refurbished and additional pipework has been laid but it remains in continual use.
Liverpool grew rapidly in the 19th century and by the 1860s its demand for water was outstripping supply. In the 1870s, the city’s borough engineer George Frederick Deacon (1843-1909) reported on the creation of a supply reservoir in the glacial valley of the Afon Vyrnwy in Powys.
The scheme found favour and Deacon joined with leading British water engineer Thomas Hawksley (1807-93) to work on the parliamentary plans. On 6th August 1880, royal assent was granted for the Liverpool Corporation Waterworks Act encompassing a large reservoir, a dam and an aqueduct from Wales to Liverpool. The corporation also purchased 9,713 hectares of land surrounding the dam site to ensure the purity of water from its catchment.
During the project, Deacon held the post of corporation water engineer 1880-90 while Hawksley was engineer-in-chief 1881-5. In 1881, work began on the Vyrnwy Dam (SJ018192), the first high masonry gravity dam in Britain. In November 1888, with the dam substantially complete, impounding water to fill the new Lake Vyrnwy (Llyn Efyrnwy) commenced. Northwest of the dam, a masonry straining tower was constructed as the water outlet to the aqueduct. Meanwhile, work on the aqueduct started in 1881. Its curving north easterly route follows the watershed of the rivers Dee and Severn, maintaining high ground through Hirnant, Oswestry, Malpas and Cotebrook. It then crosses the basins of the rivers Weaver and Mersey to finish at Prescot service reservoirs, east of Liverpool, for onward distribution. The construction entailed tunnels, balancing reservoirs, valve houses, and river and railway crossings. Initially the aqueduct consisted of a single pipeline, constructed generally of 1.07m diameter cast iron tubes (cast iron had been used for mains since around 1810). However, where the route crosses the River Mersey the pipeline is of 813mm diameter riveted steel to facilitate maintenance, and marks an early use of steel in trunk water mains. The steel pipe runs under the river through a 2.74m diameter cast iron tunnel constructed in a compressed air environment, then a pioneering technique, to prevent the structure from collapsing under pressure. The tunnel was completed successfully at the third attempt