GILCRUX 1750-1950: WILLIAM QUAYLE and WILLIAMSON PEILE

I don’t think William Quayle or Williamson Peile ever lived in Gilcrux. Insofar as I understand it at the moment, they leased properties here as functional components of their colliery enterprise. The village sits about twenty-odd miles from Whitehaven, where they lived. They may have kept country retreats here (possibly at Brookwell House and Ivy Green, though I’m still untangling those lines of enquiry.) Either way, their twenty-one-year lease of Gilcrux Colliery exists as one near-forgotten chapter in the area’s mineral history.

Gilcrux sits, a gentle rise of land, on the south bank of the River Ellen. Limestone breaks through the surface, giving “variety to the landscape.” Springs and wells set the village apart. The village is “probably unrivalled, certainly not excelled, for the number, perhaps also the variety, of its springs. Everywhere in this parish you will find water coming from natural springs throughout the greater part of the year. Most remarkable are two in a field east of the village: one sending forth fresh water, the other salt – ‘Funny Tack,’ with rumoured medicinal properties.” Mining revealed the geological cause. A dyke pushes limestone upward, creating barriers that force water to seek the path of least resistance. Hold that image, if you will. A quirk of stone and strata. A gift for the village above. Something else altogether for anyone trying to move through it on their own terms.

The wealth that enabled comprehensive control over Cumberland employment, housing and political representation had roots overseas. Robert Lowther (1681 to 1745), governor of Barbados, inherited Christ Church, a sugar plantation. In 1756, Sir James Lowther, ‘Wicked Jimmy Lowther,’ inherited Christ Church along with everything else.

“Sir James Lowther, before he came of age, was reckoned the richest commoner in England. From his father he inherited estates in Cumberland and Barbados; from Lord Lonsdale, large estates in Westmorland; and in 1756 the Cumberland property of the Lowthers of Whitehaven, including Whitehaven itself – a fortune estimated at over £2,000,000.”

William Quayle, born in 1796, was the eldest son of John and Jane. So many Quayles surface in 19th century Cumberland. I’m still tracing William’s heritage. I might never find it. His family’s roots could lie in the Isle of Man, where the surname runs deep. By the 1830s, William had secured a position within Lord Lonsdale’s extensive coal operations. William Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, was the cousin of ‘Wicked Jimmy,’ who had inherited plantation wealth, including the Christ Church Plantation in Barbados. That inheritance underwrote the control Lonsdale exercised over employment across the county.

How that control operated becomes clear in November 1832, when the Revising Barrister’s Court met in Whitehaven to determine voting rights. The 1832 Reform Act gave voting rights to property-owning men, but those rights could be challenged. A witness explained that William Quayle and his colleague Mr Jackson “lived in houses of their own” and “had an addition made to their salary, which was paid half-yearly.” The court evidence suggests this was “usual with all coal agents.” I read into that William had chosen independence over convenience. He likely declined company housing when first employed, accepting lower pay to maintain his property qualification and his vote. I get the feeling William was not a man of inherited wealth. His family had maritime or merchant roots, most probably. He rose through persistence and ability. Yet his position, though earned, was never secure. He had built everything himself, which meant everything he had built could be taken.

The same court proceedings reveal a different relationship to power. When the newspaper describes “Mr Peile examined witnesses,” I think it refers to Williamson’s father acting as a Justice of the Peace. This John Peile held judicial authority granted by class position, not effort. By the mid-1820s, he had a well-established role in Lord Lonsdale’s system.

An advertisement in the Cumberland Pacquet from January 1827 makes John Peile’s reach plain.

“MINERS WANTED, AND STEAM ENGINES FOR SALE. WANTED, at Whitehaven Collieries a Number of PITMEN. They will meet with constant Employment, and the Benefit of Free Houses during their continuance in the Works. Persons unacquainted with the Work required, will be put under experienced Hands to teach them.”

The notice continues:

“For SALE, by PRIVATE CONTRACT – A Second-hand Fourteen Horse double-powered ATMOSPHERIC ENGINE, originally constructed by Messrs. Heslop, Engineers. Also, A Thirty Horse double-powered Engine, constructed upon what is called Bolton and Watt’s Principle. Further Particulars may be known on Application to Mr. JOHN PEILE, at the Colliery Office, Whitehaven.”

Technical knowledge and authority radiate off the page. He oversaw recruitment. He managed equipment sales. Not just an agent but a commercial manager and, by the end of his career, John Peile had served thirty-seven years as chief colliery agent and forty-three years as trustee of Whitehaven’s town and harbour. His 1855 obituary described a man who “took a prominent part in all public matters connected with the port of Whitehaven” for “upwards of half a century.” He embodied the long arc of power that connected industry with governance. The family into which Williamson was born had shaped Cumberland for decades.

Williamson’s presence in Whitehaven’s elite circles, his scientific pursuits, his financial security, all of it stemmed from one source. He had inherited a place within Cumberland’s governing structure. The Peile family belonged to the prosperous middle class, with ties to professional and academic circles. The family would later boast two Cambridge Masters. By the early 1830s, Williamson had followed his father into the mining profession, becoming a colliery viewer: a role requiring knowledge, oversight and social fluency. Where William Quayle’s strategic housing decisions spoke of caution within a constrained system, Williamson’s residence on Lowther Street signalled something else. The ease of a man who had never needed to calculate quite so carefully. Yet even inherited position carried its own constraints. As the son of Lord Lonsdale’s most trusted agent, Williamson grew up under scrutiny. Every decision reflected on the family.

Perhaps that’s why, when the chance came to lease colliery rights from the Lord of the Manor at Dovenby Hall, the soon-to-be Whig politician Fretcheville Lawson Ballantine Dykes, Williamson pursued it. Dykes was no friend to the Lonsdale system. In 1820, he had nominated the Whig Curwen against Lonsdale’s candidate, declaring they needed a ‘saviour’ from ‘aristocratic bondage.’ Yet archival records suggest Lord Lonsdale may have had some involvement in this venture. The evidence points toward William and Williamson acting as Lonsdale’s agents in securing the Gilcrux colliery lease, following an established pattern. Lonsdale operated through intermediaries who handled the practical arrangements while he provided capital and influence. The documents make my eyes ache, and the exact nature of his involvement remains unclear. I’ll venture that, for Williamson, the opportunity represented possibility. For William, it was a calculated risk. Part of an expanding business built on effort, not inheritance.

In 1832, Williamson made news for something altogether removed from coal. A balloon ascent over Whitehaven. He joined the renowned aeronaut Mr Green and a Mr Paumier on a flight as crowds watched below, stepping into early luxury tourism. A gentleman’s scientific adventure that spoke as much to social standing as to curiosity. He later wrote to the Cumberland Pacquet, and the imagery of that long letter has stayed with me. He looked down at his native town, reduced to “a mingled heap of roofs and houses of the smallest size imaginable.” A horseman on the road below, horse and rider together “infinitely less than the equestrian figures which may sometimes be seen in our streets on the head of an itinerant Italian,” yet the sound of the animal’s hooves carried up with “startling distinctness.” And Duke Street, Williamson’s own street, visible from a mile up, a small brig entering the harbour beside it, “diminished in size to the smallest chip that ever amused the childhood of a future sailor.”

The man writing that letter was not simply recording an adventure. He was looking down at the system he had inherited and finding it, from sufficient altitude, a beautiful sight. I can’t help wondering what kind of system that was, in its bones. Whether paternalistic employment relationships in Cumberland carried the DNA of plantation management. The system, adapted for free workers, still operated through similar mechanisms of manufactured dependency. Hiring fairs, for example, bound agricultural workers. Apprenticeship systems controlled young lives for years. Tied cottage arrangements made housing contingent on employment. Could it be that plantation experience added a particular refinement to these controls? Psychological management transformed total dependency into something that felt, from the outside, like the master looking after his own. A system designed to make the miner essential, but expendable.

While William navigated the constraints of Lord Lonsdale’s employment system, Sarah Jackson née Bell was learning how professional networks operated from a different angle. Born in 1799 in Loweswater, her first marriage in 1822 placed her inside the same professional world that would later constrain William. As the wife of Samuel Jackson, gentleman and one-time excise officer, Sarah learned how government employment worked. The protocols, the dependencies, the unwritten rules. When Samuel died in 1829, she retained that knowledge along with her widow’s independence. She also retained responsibility for their son, William Jackson, born not in Cumberland but in Barkstone, Lincolnshire, where his father’s family had roots.

Seven years after Samuel’s death, Sarah’s path crossed William Quayle’s. On 23 April 1836, a marriage notice appeared in the Carlisle Journal: “Mr Quayle, of Roper-street, colliery viewer, to Mrs Jackson, of High-street.” Just three days earlier, William had written his will “in contemplation of a marriage with Sarah Jackson of Whitehaven aforesaid widow.” The will reveals careful planning and something warmer too. William settled “a considerable Sum part of my own personal property” on Sarah, gave her his house on Roper Street “with all my household furniture & Bedding plate Linen China,” and named her co-executor alongside his brother Thomas. The language throughout is precise and protective. Here was a man arranging his affairs for a future he intended to share. That same month, the Carlisle Journal recorded another death: Thomas Quayle, grocer, of Roper Street, Whitehaven, in the 26th year of his age. Could this man have been William’s brother?

In 1831, William and Williamson secured their lease from Fretcheville Lawson Ballantine Dykes. Surviving documentation reveals that by early January 1832, Cockermouth solicitor John Steel was coordinating the legal formalities. Steel, who from archive material I can see helped structure the systems of power that defined industrial West Cumberland, would later become a Liberal MP for Cockermouth (1854 to 1868).

Further evidence of their partnership exists in a copper mining token marked: QUAYLE & PEILE. These tokens functioned as company currency, giving employers control over workers beyond wages alone. A man paid in tokens redeemable only at the company shop had no wages to save, no independence to build. The token is small. What it represents is not.

Archive material shows the two men leasing operations in this village, and in nearby Warthole and Allerby, all while fulfilling duties to Lord Lonsdale. This surely created many opportunities for conflicts of interest and divided loyalties. William was not marginal. He operated several ventures, maintained property, left behind a substantial estate. Might William have created a dangerous multiple dependency, accountable to his employer, to his business partner, and to the Lord of the Manor?

William and Williamson could not escape the political tensions that shaped their working lives. In 1831, the same year they leased the coal-bearing lands from Fretcheville Dykes, tensions erupted on the streets of Whitehaven. The Cumberland Pacquet reported what it called a “Dreadful Riot at Whitehaven.”

Trouble began during the heated campaign around the Reform Bill, when Whitehaven colliers received orders to march to Cockermouth to support the Liberal candidate against Conservative opposition. This was not voluntary political participation. These were instructions from employers, treating workers as instruments of political influence. One newspaper account places William and Williamson at the centre of events. “Mr. Quayle, Mr. Jackson, and Mr. W. Peile ordered the colliers to form a line from the inn door, and allow any gentleman to pass who chose to leave it.” Here were two men attempting to build their independent business empire, yet acting as crowd control officers during a political riot, managing agitated workers on behalf of their employer. Another local paper accused the Cumberland Pacquet of distortion, calling its descriptions full of “falsehoods … that amiable paper has lost none of its ancient fibbing propensities.”

In mid-October 1831, just weeks after the riot, William wrote a letter that reveals another side of his character. The recipient was John Steel, and the message was short and pointed. “The Bill is in its last stage, and to be a consistent Reformer you must give it your interest.” To call someone a Reformer in 1831 was not casual. It meant modernisation, progress, a break from entrenched privilege. William was also pursuing a local goal, securing the lease on the coal mine in the parish. Here was someone who linked business with politics, who understood that power and leases reflected political alignment as much as negotiation. Rhetorically skilled, politically aware, conscious of the moment he inhabited. That makes what follows all the more difficult to read.

On a Monday afternoon in July 1837, a boy of thirteen or fourteen named William Shepherd was in the street near the Free School in Whitehaven. He saw William Quayle walk past, heading toward James’s Pit. Alone. He watched him go in at the door of the paling surrounding the shaft. He did not see him come out. William shut the door behind him, not quite closed. Five minutes later, the boy looked in at the door. William was not visible. No person could have left without being seen.

That night, around half past ten, William Hetherington went out to find him. He searched through the dark hours. A quarter before eleven the following morning, he found the body in the water at the foot of the shaft. All his clothes on. Except one shoe. The almanack had come to rest eighty-four fathoms down, at the Main Band. His hat floated on the surface of the water, ten fathoms below. A post in the shaft appeared newly broken, conjectured to have snapped in the fall. The shaft was forty fathoms deep. The coroner observed that a person falling that distance might be dead before reaching the water.

The inquest opened the same afternoon, within three hours of the body coming up. The Cumberland Pacquet later noted, with evident regret, that every gentleman who could have thrown light on the circumstances was absent. They were across town, paying the last tribute to another townsman whose remains lay that day at Gosforth. Nobody called the people who last saw and spoke to William that morning. The jury heard what little it heard. The coroner guided them toward the only conclusion the limited evidence permitted. Found Drowned. But the inquest was not the end of it.

The Cumberland Pacquet of 18 July reported that William had that morning been summoned to an interview with the head and confidential servants of Lord Lonsdale, by whom he had been charged with fraud. Not mere irregularity, the paper was emphatic on this point, but “a deep-laid system of plunder, upon an extensive scale, difficult of detection, and therefore successfully pursued.” Documents were found in his possession. Proofs, the paper said, that all his subtlety could not explain away. He was given time, not refused it. He was not dismissed. The evidence at the time of accusation was sufficient to have justified immediate custody, yet Lonsdale’s people had erred on the side of leniency. His salary, the paper added, was not small. It was “very liberal – amply sufficient to enable him to live not only with respectability, but, considering his station, in comparative affluence.” He had not erred from poverty. When his frauds were detected, he had not sufficient strength of mind to bear the disgrace. He rushed into self-destruction. The paper called it, without hesitation, “this dreadful suicide.”

Three weeks later, on 8 August, the argument was still running in print. The coroner himself, Peter Hodgson, wrote to the paper’s editor. He admitted that inquiring into the state of mind of a suicide is the first duty in such cases. But there had been no evidence to establish suicide, he said, and therefore no necessity to examine William’s state of mind. He wrote that he was “pretty sure that no one can prove that Mr. Quayle cast himself into the pit, and such a fact ought not to be assumed.”

The Cumberland Pacquet was not impressed. It identified the letter’s author as one of the coroners for the county of Cumberland and accused him, with barely concealed contempt, of writing with no purpose other than to lead the paper into statements that might render it liable for libel. Then it made a specific claim that the inquest had never established. William Quayle, the paper stated, “was killed by falling on the props of the pit, before he reached the water, and had any question been put as to the state of his body, that fact would have been very clearly elicited.” Dead before he reached the water, killed by the fall itself. Nobody settled the argument.

What do I make of all this, after years of following these breadcrumbs? Someone caught William in a serious fraud. The evidence against him was documentary and, by the account of those who saw it, substantial. He had built his entire position on trust, reliability. “Never mistrusted, never doubted,” as the paper put it. When that trust collapsed, nothing remained to negotiate with. He walked to James’s Pit on a Monday afternoon. One shoe came up. His almanack came to rest eighty-four fathoms down. A post in the shaft was newly broken. The inquest called it Found Drowned. The newspaper called it suicide. The coroner called it unproven. What did Sarah think?

That same month, that same year, while all of this played out in the newspapers of Cumberland, his business partner was celebrating. Williamson Peile married Elizabeth Hodgson in Whitehaven. The notice in the Carlisle Journal was clear and simple: “At Whitehaven, on Tuesday last, Williamson Peile, Esquire, F.G.S., Colliery Viewer, to Elizabeth, daughter of the late Mr Hodgson, of Cross Street.” One man ascended. The other lay at the bottom of a shaft, forty fathoms down, one shoe on, his hat floating somewhere above him in the dark.

A letter survives, dated from Douglas, Isle of Man, 19 July. The writer, Fretcheville Dykes. “Our county papers arriving late I only last night became aware of the shocking tragedy which has taken place at Whitehaven – and to make it still more dreadful, the very day and hour of our arriving in Whitehaven to go by the steam packet.”

He had passed James’s Pit, he said, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes after William died. He had intended to visit William’s house that morning, about the railway, but hadn’t had time, had written a note instead. “Now what will be done? – Will his wife try herself or friends continue to do anything in the colliery thing or will it be entirely in the hands of the Peiles…”

It sounded practical, respectful. But not neutral. Sarah might appoint someone, Dykes suggested, but that someone should be independent of the Whitehaven collieries, should not interfere with the railway. The power here lay not in command but in suggestion. Sarah faced a choice that someone else had already shaped. And still, she was named. Present. Not merely a widow or a beneficiary, but someone who now held part of the lease. Fretcheville Dykes had asked the question. Sarah would begin to answer it.

William’s death triggered a legal battle over an estate valued at about £4,000, including Ivy Green here in Gilcrux. This placed him firmly within the ranks of Cumberland’s professional class. Not a man scraping by, but someone who had amassed wealth and obligations in careful proportion across every year of his working life.

An inheritance dispute unfolded over several years. William’s will had named his brother Thomas as co-executor alongside Sarah, a sensible choice, given Thomas’s proximity. Thomas died that same April, within weeks of the wedding. His brother James, a mariner with extended absences at sea, was unavailable for such responsibilities and, the records suggest, believed himself entitled to inherit despite William’s documented wishes. The gap between traditional familial expectation and legal documentation: a fault line that ran through many Victorian families, and it certainly ran sharp here.

James died in September 1838, a year after William, described in the Carlisle Journal as a “mariner, aged 34 years, brother of the late Mr William Quayle, of Whitehaven.” Before anything was settled. The courts eventually confirmed that Eliza and John, children of William’s deceased brother John Quayle, were the rightful heirs to his estate. But their inheritance faced challenges from their uncle Isaac Nicholson, who wrote affectionate letters to his niece Eliza while simultaneously filing legal claims that would strip her of everything. The courts later recognised his strategy as duplicitous. By 1840, property records show John taking over William’s customary tenement in the village. The transfer complete. Sarah, watching all of this, was pursuing a different strategy.

The back page of one indenture, dated 10 September 1838, carries three words above a red wax seal: Mrs. Sarah Quayle. Assignment. Thirteen months after William’s death, Sarah was already moving. Assigning property, protecting her position, administering not only William’s estate but the residuary legacy of Samuel Jackson, her first husband, which had apparently remained unresolved across the years of her second marriage. Two husbands’ legal affairs, managed at once, by a woman the archive lists simply as widow.

Before she left Whitehaven, Sarah held an auction at 17 Lowther Street. The Cumberland Pacquet of 27 April 1841 advertised the sale of all her valuable household goods and furniture: mahogany dining, card and other tables; one handsome mahogany couch with chairs to match; one mahogany lounging chair; two sets of scarlet moreen window hangings; a cheffonier; an escritoire and bookcase; a new Brussels carpet… She sold it piece by piece. Then left.

The 1841 census finds Sarah and Isabella Quayle at Quality Corner, Moresby, in the household of Hodgson and Jane Steel. Eight people in that house. Sarah listed as Independent, aged forty. Isabella listed as Independent, aged thirty. Young William Jackson, fifteen, birthplace a dash. The Steel household was modest, Hodgson an agricultural labourer, but Sarah’s designation as Independent required demonstrable income. Who were the Hodgsons to Sarah? Was Jane Steel related to John Steel? I looked up Quality Corner (far enough from Whitehaven to offer distance from scandal, but close enough to maintain the business connections she needed?).

As local histories confirm, Sarah and Elizabeth Peile maintained involvement in the village colliery until the 1852 expiration of the original twenty-one-year lease. Two women, brought together by their husbands’ partnership, continued the operation that had once tied their families together. They held it for nine years after Williamson’s death. Fifteen years after William’s. What allowed them to do so? Sarah had managed two professional households, navigated the bureaucratic demands of an excise officer’s domestic life and then a colliery viewer’s. She had survived scandal, relocation, a contested estate, a decade of legal proceedings, and kept moving. Elizabeth had grown up inside the Peile family’s mining knowledge. She then demonstrated administrative precision in her stamp distribution work, succeeding her late mother as sub-distributor of stamps in Whitehaven, managing public accounts in a society that preferred women invisible. These were not women adrift in their husbands’ wake. They were women who understood the structures around them, and who knew, when the time came, how to hold those structures steady.

Archive records show Sarah managing a £1,000 mortgage in 1849, executing a reconveyance of property in 1859 alongside her son. Still legally and financially active into her sixties. The documents stretch from 1838 to 1859. Twenty-one years of sustained authority. Sarah died in Aspatria in August 1866, aged sixty-seven, in what was by then her son’s house. William Jackson had become a shipowner, a Justice of the Peace, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He helped found the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society. The boy with the Lincolnshire birthplace and the dash in the census, raised in a regrouping household at Quality Corner, had built something lasting. Sarah got him there, but history is pretty silent on how.

There was another woman in this orbit too. William’s sister-in-law, Isabella Quayle. In 1849, twelve years after William’s death, Isabella appeared in bankruptcy proceedings, not as a dependent, but as a creditor with the power to dismantle a man’s business. The courts declared Joseph Clementson, a Whitehaven tobacconist, bankrupt at her petition. To initiate that action required financial resources and familiarity with commercial law. Isabella operated as an independent businesswoman with capital enough to lend and the resolve to enforce repayment. Her death notice, from 1887, reads: “At San Remo, on the 11th inst. Mrs. Isabella Quayle, late of Aspatria, aged 77 years.” A health resort on the Italian Riviera, popular among wealthy British visitors for its climate and its distance from everything familiar. She died there. She had the means to choose her ending, and she chose warmth but a place that had nothing to do with coal.

After William’s death, Williamson continued to operate the colliery they had established together. A brief reference in the Kendal Mercury of July 1840 noted coal shipments from “the pits of Mr. W. Peile, of the village” via the new railway to Maryport. Williamson was also pursuing the scientific interests that had always marked his professional identity. His paper, Notes on a Singular Transformation of the Seams of Coal into Stone at Crummock Colliery, earned him election as a Fellow of the Geological Society. Such knowledge would have been vital in managing the complex geology of the coal measures in Gilcrux parish too.

In September 1837, just two months after his marriage, correspondence shows him serving as an intermediary for a scientific charitable initiative. A letter from Liverpool, dated 18 September, begins: “My dear Peile – We have had a glorious week at Liverpool.” The correspondent, Professor Sedgwick, described how a miner named Daniel Brennan had given an account of rescuing four trapped men and had moved the assembled geologists so deeply that a collection was taken on the spot. Sedgwick enclosed a bill for thirty-seven pounds two shillings, to be passed on to Brennan. He signed it: “Very truly yours, R. Sedgwick.” Sedgwick trusted Williamson with the money and with the errand. The letter places him inside the highest circles of British scientific life, respected by men who had no reason to grant that respect casually. Worth remembering, given what the system had just done to his partner.

In 1843, six years after William’s death, the Derbyshire Courier reported: “At Hastings, of rapid decline, to the great grief of his family and friends, Williamson Peile, Esq., F.G.S., late of Whitehaven, civil engineer, in the 33rd year of his age.” Consumption or Tuberculosis. That relentless disease that moved through Victorian society with indifference to class. Williamson was not yet thirty-four. He left behind Elizabeth and their children. His will, proved on 11 January 1844, made careful provision for them, naming his father John and his brother Thomas Williamson Peile as executors alongside Elizabeth.

Possibly fraud and disgrace destroyed William, offering no route of escape despite his property and his standing. Disease took Williamson regardless of the insulation his position provided. Each, in different ways, was consumed by the industry they had helped to build. This is where the balloon letter comes back to me. The balloon becoming “as tense as before” as the gas expanded with altitude. The silk appearing “ready to burst.” The rapid descent. “We prepared ourselves for the concussion on falling to the earth.” He had prepared himself. He had recorded the sensations with scientific precision. But of course some descents can’t be prepared for.

The communities around the collieries and Gilcrux were shaped by daily realities that the newspapers noted, and then moved past. In August 1840, “a workman of the name of Monkhouse got his foot in the switches” as coal wagons left the village. “Three of the waggon wheels” crushed “his foot and ancle.” The paper concluded: “No blame is to be attributed to any one.” But these same communities pushed back too. In January 1841, an “officious Lord of the soil” had built a wall around a well in Gilcrux “which had long been used by the inhabitants.” In response, the villagers “assembled in great numbers” and tore the wall down “amidst loud cheering.” They lit a bonfire on the spot to celebrate the protection of what the report called “an ancient right of obtaining water.”

After a couple of years researching this story, I loved reading about the bonfire and the cheers. I needed the image of ordinary folk tearing down a wall around their own water and lighting a fire to mark it. The springs still run in the fields and gardens around Gilcrux. The dyke beneath pushes limestone upward still, forces water to find its own way through.

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