06-02-2016, 04:41 AM
(05-02-2016, 11:49 PM)EllieV wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The pipes in the German manuscript - is it possible they were used in the process of drying the saltpeter? Something that has holes to help vent?
That's definitely a possibility.
(05-02-2016, 11:00 PM)-JKP- wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The pipes in the VMS often remind me of the pipes that were left over from the old Roman aqueducts which, I believe, were ceramic.
Here is how the water supply pipes look in the same manuscript. They are colored the same as the dotted pipes - but no dots. How did they supply those castles in the Alps with water? Did they dig wells or had aqueducts?
There were some aqueducts that supplied water to hilly places using water pumps along river (they look like flour mills in the old pictures but some of them are water pumps) but they couldn't raise the level of the water very much. Mostly they supplied water via gravity for downstream/downhill communities.
I think the water for berg-castles/mountain castles (which I think were called burgs in the middle ages—a term that became a more general name for a town later on) mostly came from springs and wells tapping into the springs. When I was looking for old buildings, I discovered many hill towns that were abandoned and have been for centuries. I wonder if the people left because the water supply ran out.