At the Seventh Bridge landing, the water queue is kept with copper tags on a board beside the cistern. One household moves its tag when the keeper calls the turn; it moves again when the channel begins to run. On a slow release, those marks can be separated by most of a bell.
The residents do not use the board to dispute that the gate opened. They use it to show how long a posted turn takes to reach the last landing. The water office’s total is written at the top of the slate. The tags are the part each household can verify for itself.
A keeper walked the stair during the last low-flow release and entered the arrival time beside the gate mark. The entries do not yet cover a full cycle, and they cannot show how much water was lost at the bend. They do show that a queue can keep its order while the wait grows longer for the homes at the bottom.
The next observation is meant to pair that arrival mark with the North Sluice’s release and the level at the last cistern. Until those three readings are taken together, the board answers who was called, not whether each turn arrived on time.
