Not a building of any kind now exists at Shingay, and very few at the adjoining Wendy, where, at every turn, we are greeted by a wealth of fresh-springing waters, derived from the artesian wells of the old coprolite diggings. The height in which the water in these wells rises is strangely variable. They are always made on the same system; an ordinary well being dug through the upper strata till the impervious gault is reached, which may be any distance from six to sixty feet below the surface. A four-inch bore is then made through the gault by means of a sort of Brobdingnagian cheese-taster, four or five feet long, screwed to an iron handle three times that length. Again and again the taster is brought up, full of gault, and its contents or "core" thrown aside. As the bore gets deeper more irons are added, till the water-bearing greensand or "rock" is attained, usually in the second hundred feet of the bore. The taster is then removed and a "chisel" substituted for "striking the rock," _i.e._, punching a hole by lifting the entire length of irons a few feet and letting it fall. By and by up comes the water, quite suddenly for the most part, gushing from the bore and filling the well till it finds its level. This, as we have said, is curiously different in different spots; in some it does not reach the surface, and has to be pumped up; in others, as here at Wendy, it will supply a fountain eight or ten feet in height. One of these picturesquely gushes out from the top of an old wooden gate-post, up which some artistically-minded coprolite-digger has engineered its course. It is almost medicinal in the quantity of iron with which it is impregnated, but delicious to drink, and the softest possible. This gate-post is beside the lane leading on Guilden Morden, the last village before we once more reach Ashwell, and itself standing on an outlying mound of the Ashwell chalk. Round this elevation the Cam takes a wide sweep. We may record that Wendy is the highest point along its course which navigation has ever attained. The breadth at Ashwell at once suggests to visitors that a canoe could reach the spot, and many an attempt has been made by ambitious undergraduates. But the upper reaches are so choked up with reeds and weeds and rushes and bushes that no one has ever penetrated further than this spot, some four miles, by water-way, below the source.