What on EARTH???

An identification thread with a difference, but if you can help, I'll be VERY grateful! Following a very helpful thread on here regarding potatoes, I decided to make a start on digging them somewhere to live. I was going to make them a whole new bed at the end of the garden but as I'm new to gardening and have a LOT to do I decided to extend the veg patch I'd already dug instead. This involved moving a huge slab which I had already decided I needed somewhere else instead. I lifted it up and this is what I found:

My face isn't in the pic but if you could see it, you'd appreciate my shock and horror. It looks like half a plastic barrel filled with water and seems to have a pipe leading in to it. After much bafflement and swearing, I decided to cover it up using the smaller slab you can see in the pic. Then THIS happened:

ARGGGHH, another one!!! Does anyone have any idea what on earth they are? More importantly, how am I going to get rid of them?? They are taking up valuable growing room. Do you think they could have anything to do with these pipes:
I've been asking everyone who comes round what these pipes are, and no one can tell me, not even 3 different plumbers. I've keen on getting rid of them as they are hideously ugly and right by my back door. They may be unrelated but if anyone has any ideas at all I'll be very grateful as I am very confused. I can't ask the previous owner as she's dead. Help.

 

Sorry I have no idea, but I know border collies, and I know that expression. That look/posture usually means "there's something moving in there, and I'm determined to know what it was".

 

Hahaha, you're so right, she was fascinated by the two new ponds that had suddenly appeared in her garden! Once a leaf fell in and started floating round in circles she was hooked. She was most unimpressed when I put the slabs back and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to dig under them...

 

Simple to identify.. a pain in the a**!

It looks to me, like it's someones attempt at either making drainage better, or conserving water in drought situations which might prevent the soil from drying out?? Or perhaps a water butt in the ground? They look more like large buckets than pipes, but I could be wrong?

 

The last pic looks like a pipework arrangement so (waste?) water can be diverted from from that gully to elsewhere, by closing off the waste pipe on the RH side and leaving the LH side pipe 'valve' in line and running.

Bail out those blue half barrels to check for inlet pipe(s).

 

I'm with Scrungee on this one, diverters so that if something nasty is going down the drain like bleach, it can go to the sewer instead of the soakaway.

 

PITA is right Stephen!
Thank you very much for your replies guys. The barrels do seem to have pipes going in to them. I'll have to look at them in more detail, I think they are about 18 inches deep. The pipes by the house go straight in under the floor so I don't know where they go but they could well go to the bath, it's a ground floor flat. The barrels are about maybe 40 feet from the house. The place was owned and lived in by an elderly lady who was there for about 30 years. The mystery of the ugly pipes may be soved then (it has been really bugging me), but now I have to figure out what to do about it! Maybe I could try growing water cress in them

 

If the barrels are about 18 inches deep, and about 40 ft from the house, then I guess you may have a problem in that the pipes feeding the barrels are close to the surface, and therefore likely to be accidentally damaged if you do some digging.

If it is collecting bath water, then that could be a good thing if we ever get summer, because it means you'll always be able to water your garden while others are suffering the hosepipe ban.

 

There's more than one possible explanation (grey water for the garden) as to why waste water has been diverted to those half barrels as there could be

1) A problem with that gulley trap being prone to blockages.

2) Or even worse, a partially blocked foul drain and instead of repairing it, some sort of Heath Robinson diversion to a garden watering system has been constructed to turn on when it starts surcharging.

That's assuming you're connected to mains drainage rather than a cess-pit.

 

How bizarre! If this set up is for collecting grey water to use in the garden, how did the previous owner access it? Surely the old lady didn't lift the flag stones each time??