What Is a Rill ?

           

This rill comes to us from karlgercen.com

             What is a rill, and why should you care ?   A rill, or in German or Swedish a rille, is a narrow water stream. These occasionally occur naturally, but our mention today is of rills that are man-made. Man-made rills first became very popular when the Romans came to England, which incidentally is about fifty-five years before Jesus was born.  They were an efficient way to bring water from one place to another.  Persian gardens may also have had rills but they were wider than the ones I wish to discuss today.  A rill can help you take water from a place where water is plentiful, to a place some distance away, where it is needed, for plants or for animals. It also can be used as an exquisite water feature for a garden.
              Often, rills have concrete sides which keep them intact, straight and beautiful, but they may also be lined with bricks or rectangular stones. Some are lined with the same waterproof linings that we use in ponds.

This is a much less typical rill, because it curves, but it too has concrete walls.  Travis St Clair

                    Today, rills are most often seen in lovely British formal gardens. They are sometimes seen in Japanese gardens though often in tandem with other water features such as waterfalls of various sizes.  A rill can simply have still water which has movement during rain or when the water in the source is high, or it may have movement because the owner has installed a small circulating pump, just as we might use in a small pond we have installed in a garden. Keep in mind that water that is moving, always stays cleaner than water that is stagnant.

This is a modern rill. Austin Patterson Disston.

                       The rill above is straight, bit it can also we constructed on an incline, and occasionally in a sculpture.  You may consider having a rill installed in order to beautify a garden, or increase the value of a property before sale.  You might install a rill in order to provide water to plants or to animals, while beautifying a certain area of an otherwise uninspired garden.


These are directions as to how you might install a rill:

https://homeguides.sfgate.com/build-rill-water-garden-60617.html


These are other links that apply to rills:


 https://www.gardenguides.com/how_5698493_build-rill-water-garden.html

 https://www.intergardening.co.uk/features/water/streams/rill.html

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3eSlDvGdaM

 https://www.gardensillustrated.com/garden-design/what-you-need-to-know-before-building-a-rill/

 https://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/welsh-homes/clive-edwards-explains-how-build-2045183

https://www.stoneworld.co.uk/how-to-build-a-garden-rill/




                  Since I am in the process of deciding where on my farm a rill would be most attractive and most useful, I may have a future post which provides additional insights.