The Barn by Ralph Hagen for October 09, 2018

Rory is a good investigative reporter! Someone needs to be! :D

Some questions are better left unanswered, Rory.

Who in their right mind asks such stupid questions?

Maybe someone left a pail of water on top of a hill.

Someone who discovers an artesian spring “up the hill.”

or the inattentive engineer that tried to have me put a radio tower in a lake that was at the top of a hill. Really! he didn’t know the squiggly lines on a topographic map mean water. And that is where the lake actually was. So getting a pail full was possible.

Golly. I never thought of that. See what you learn from reading the comics!

But you can often find a spring on a hill, where geological folding can bring a water bearing layer up to where erosion can open it, so you can get a source of water up the hill. No well involved.

I expect mountain folk do…

Nothing in the rhyme says it’s a well, or on top of the hill; that’s just generations of lazy nursery-rhyme artists. If it’s a spring or a stream, you want to go collect the water uphill, before it flows through the pastures (and the livestock gets a chance to do what livestock does in water).

I think they were going up to chip off a little glacier.

To keep ground run-off from getting into the well you dig it up the hill. It might make digging the well, a bit harder but it keeps the water cleaner in the long run.

Jack & Jill went up the hill

Each of them had a quarter.

Jill came down with half a buck

Think they went up for water?

Sounds like a no-bid government contract.

Nobody sayin’ that the fetching spot was at the top of the hill; perhaps it was only half-way up the hill…