It might be a spring or it might be a perched water table.
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If after you pump out the PVC, the water returns quickly then if means the surrounding soil is permeable and an aquifer. To stay there most/all the time, it must be supported by an aquitard and subject to recharge (from surrounding aquifer).
Genuine springs are created by an underground water resources that has hydraulic head at the ground surface. Most commonly that occurs part way down a hill with the right hydrological structures. Sometimes it can occur on flat land as an "artesian well".
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The size and geometry of the recharging aquifer and the quality of the water within it, determines how practically useful a spring might be.
Thank you for those diagrams.
Considering the two springs I did develop were bubbling up at ground level they may have been artesian wells.
The first one I developed I had go down 3' to a ahale level were the water came out sideways. It will slow to a trickle in August our dryest month.
The second required I go another 2 feet down to another shale layer. It will slow down but never saw it stop completely. Serms like an aquifer above another aquifer.
Both of the developed springs are on the slope of a ravine carved out by erosion of a stream bed. There is a large wooded area above that collects the rain and feeds the aquifers.
On the other side of the ravine there is a seasonally wet spot that is a swampy mess. There often small mud tubes that 2-3" tall around it. I was once rold they were made by crayfish but that may be wrong. I could imagine they the results of the water bubbling up. It produces enough water for cattails to grow in a ditch down hill from it.
A 100 yards farther along the hillside there is shale cliff outcropping below which there about seven distinct places where water emerges. They feed a creek that never goes dry year round. (I theorize the springs undermined the hillside forming the rock outcropping) . Those springs are at a slightly lower elevation than the previously mentioned wet spot.
Beyond the stream bed fed by the seven springs I discovered a circle if bricks. It appears to be a filled in well. About 50-75 feet from the brick circle to where the chicken coup my mother was born in.
So....
My theory is that I am looking at multiple strata of shale, some permeable and others not, with fissures that allow higher aquifers to feed lower.
Complicated stuff this water stuff!
Now to further complicate this dribble...
I used to work for a liberal prepper (yes that is a real thing. He's an OK guy) I described an odd pattern to him that observed while watching the springs feed the pond. The flows would ebb and flow over a 3-5 minute cycle. Huh?
Turns out he worked a problem in grad school that modeled water dynamics in aquifers.
Turns iut water will like in a tub slosh around.
I know too much words. I like springs.
Ben
! 
Definitely would be a spring!
