Rothschild legacy

Had a work party on the nature reserve today and got very wet and cold. Conditions were seriously difficult for photography so when I was packing away tools, all I could manage was a shot of this wonderful building in a deep valley at the southern end of the reserve. It is a pumping station built by the Rothschild family in 1866 to supply water to a cluster of their big houses in this part of Buckinghamshire and to the villages in the area which had major problems with disease from their poor water supplies. It still houses pumps supplying Thames Water with clean water from the aquifer hundreds of feet below the Chiltern Hills, but now they are electric pumps and the old steam engine, named Dancersend, has pride of place in the Steam Museum at Kew.

The nature reserve was established by the Rothschild family in 1941 and we now use the old Forge building, on the left of the photograph, for an HQ for our volunteer conservation team. More about the history of the reserve and the Rothschilds in future Blips.