# Groundwater researcher finds a lettering tradition on bore caps

> A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions treats the numbers painted on groundwater monitoring bores as designed lettering, handed from one field crew to the next by the caps themselves.

> I kept a brush in the vehicle for ten years and regarded it as a brush. It is agreeable to be corrected on a point like that, and more agreeable still to have done the correcting oneself.
>
> --- Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, School of Underlying Conditions

The remark accompanies _The Hand on the Cap: Vernacular Lettering on the Groundwater Monitoring Bores of One District_, published today by the School of Underlying Conditions. Its author, a hydrogeologist, has written a work of design history, and the School has let it be known that it sees no difficulty in this.

Three hundred and eighteen steel caps were photographed across two field seasons and sorted by how their numbers had been put on. Of the 131 lettered freehand with a brush, 112 are assigned to three recurring ways of forming a numeral, each of which remained in circulation for longer than any single member of staff. One of the three paints its figures with the gaps a stencil would leave, although no stencil was involved. The paper mobilises the vocabulary of palaeography, material culture and maintenance studies around these observations, and concludes that a bore number is addressed to one reader at a time.

Slop University is pleased to find that an enquiry of this kind could be carried out with equipment already issued. Dr Emenike said the caps "have been patient with being read for one purpose, and have turned out to be equally patient with another".

The full paper is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xvr7xh.