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Our Exploits At West Poley, subtitled "a story for boys", is short story by Thomas Hardy. Written in 1883,[ citation needed ] it was not published until 1892 in the Youth's Companion, and then serialised in an obscure American periodical, The Household, from November 1892 to April 1893. It was used as a basis for two films, "The Secret Cave" released in 1953 [1] and a 1985 film "Exploits At West Poley". [2]
Written in the Victorian era, the story is set in the fictional village of West Poley where water from a small river is used to run a watermill, but the miller's apprentice (a child) is badly beaten. The apprentice and two other children enter nearby caves and discover a previously unknown passage leading to a place where the river can easily be diverted into a different channel. After diverting it, they find the river now flows through another village (East Poley) and the West Poley mill can no longer operate. The children then stage a magic trick for the children of East Poley, claiming to be able to redirect the river at will. However, they discover that not all is well in East Poley after the redirection (for example a landowner tries to turn a poorer lady's garden into a mill pond) and so they decide to divert the river down a third channel and permanently seal off the first two channels so that the river will flow through neither village. The third channel however turns out to be a cul de sac and the cave begins filling with water. The children decide they have been meddling too much and begin removing their stones but are unable to complete this work before the water traps them. The miller arrives (together with the shoemaker) via an alternative entrance that was not previously known to be connected to the same cave; the miller falls into the water and nearly drowns, and his apprentice saves him after making him promise not to beat him again. Next the miller wishes to have priority on the rescue rope, which the child grants in exchange for his complete release. All are saved, and then the pressure of the accumulating water becomes strong enough to forcibly reopen its original channel and everything goes back to normal. However the details of the cave are now public knowledge, and the adults of the two villages proceed to engage in their own squabbles over the river, redirecting it several times. To end this, one of the original children obtains a small amount of gunpowder and, using his intimate knowledge of the cave to position it effectively, seals both access routes beyond all hope of being re-opened. All then settle down to a quiet life.
The Don River is a watercourse in southern Ontario that empties into Lake Ontario, at Toronto Harbour. Its mouth was just east of the street grid of the town of York, Upper Canada, the municipality that evolved into Toronto, Ontario. The Don is one of the major watercourses draining Toronto that have headwaters in the Oak Ridges Moraine.
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The River Frome, once also known as the Stroudwater, is a small river in Gloucestershire, England. It is to be distinguished from another River Frome in Gloucestershire, the Bristol Frome, and the nearby River Frome, Herefordshire. The river is approximately 25 miles (40 km) long.
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The River Poddle is a river in Dublin, Ireland, a pool which gave the city its English language name. Boosted by a channel made by the Abbey of St. Thomas à Becket, taking water from the far larger River Dodder, the Poddle was the main source of drinking water for the city for more than 500 years, from the 1240s. The Poddle, which flows wholly within the traditional County Dublin, is one of around a hundred members of the River Liffey system, and one of over 135 watercourses in the county; it has just one significant natural tributary, the Commons Water from Crumlin.
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Mellor Mill, also known as Bottom's Mill, was a six-story cotton mill in Marple, Greater Manchester built by Samuel Oldknow in 1793. This was a six-storey, 42-foot (13 m) wide and 210-foot (64 m) long mill with additional three-storey wings making it 400 feet (120 m) in all. The mill was built for Samuel Oldknow and used to spin coarse counts. It was originally driven by the Wellington water wheel. The River Goyt, and with it the then county boundary between Derbyshire and Cheshire was diverted and a weir built, the leat fed a millpond that in later times was named the Roman Lakes. This in turn fed a second mill pond along with water from reservoir in Linnet Clough. Supplementary power was provided by a second exterior wheel known as the Waterloo wheel. The Mill reached its peak production in 1804, when 10,080 spindles were operating and around 550 people were employed. It was destroyed by fire in 1892.
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