Interesting Spring

I bought some land in East Tennessee back in August. As we have been exploring it we found out it had a spring. Last weekend we found the spring and took a look at it. The overflow from spring runs down a valley and then goes into the ground about 100 feet or so down the valley as it isn't a huge volume of water and there is lots of limestone in the area. The spring is a muddy / damp area with a pipe that the water comes out of... it looks like the pipe was driven pretty much horizontally into the ground. You can't really see it in the attached picture as it had a big clump of grasses growing in the pipe. I pulled out the grass and it seemed to increase the water flow a tiny bit. I didn't calculate the water flow this trip but it's a good trickle.

I have never seen a spring like this. I'm curious if anyone has any experience with one like this. It really looks like a pvc pipe driven horizontally into the ground. How was it put in? How far do you think it goes back? I'm wondering as it is all wet in the area if we could drive another pipe in the ground in a different direction to get more water as what is coming out probably won't be enough for livestock and watering of gardens, etc. Any help would be appreciated.

thanks,

Keith Murphy

http://www.permaculturefreedom.com

Someone has improved that spring. By excavating, you may get more water for a time, but you also run the risk of depleting the reservoir. Many springs have a relatively small catchment area. When you bugger with limestone, there's a real risk of causing the water to find a deeper fissure. A small spring could be two shovels of silt from oblivion. Be careful and enjoy.

YouTube has many examples of spring development.

Keith Murphy : I second every thing Dale said, I expect like most horse watering troughs this was a swap some where up hill and the person
that put that in there just dug down to it and laid the pipe horizontally, if you follow the terrain always going down hill the whole way, you will
end up at the side of a road, and with a good Topographical map be able to mark where the spring lies.

It will be fun to fill a gallon jug and check the amount of time it takes to fill it, if there is a marked seasonal difference it is fed from surface
runoff, if it does not very or only varies by 20% or lees this is probably near surface out cropping of a water bearing rock seam!

Good luck ! big AL