On Daeheung Farm, there is a spring that does not dry in winter. It was always there — a small ongdalsaem (옹달샘), a pool fed from underground. I enclosed it and named it Daeheung Spring (대흥샘).
How It Was Built
No magic, no machinery doing the fine work. Just time and mortar.
- A hired excavator traced the underground source and opened the ground around it.
- I ordered a marble coping — the rim that edges the basin — from a stone mason.
- Then I mixed and applied roughly 100 bags of 40 kg mortar by hand to seal the floor and walls of the basin.
That is four tonnes of mortar, mixed and trowelled over several months.
The right words: built a spring, not dug a well. The water was already there. The work was enclosing it, edging it in marble, making it permanent.
What It Is Now
My wife and daughter wash wild greens (namul, 나물) in the spring water. The marble edge is smooth. The water stays cold and clear year-round.
The spring also feeds the pool alongside the pavilion below — a 10 × 4 metre basin that fills through the warm months and becomes a summer swimming pool.
It is the central image of this whole project. When someone asks why a 60-year-old man builds apps from scratch instead of using off-the-shelf software, I think of this spring: the water was already there — I just made it usable.
