Where is that dang thing?

The trough in winter. NOT a good time to locate a lost plug, but not a current excuse for losing it...

So, I'm out in the gorgeous, cooling evening (night?) air, sloshing around in the wet (very!) grass, looking for the plug to the water trough and it has disappeared. The grass is wet as I have drained the last two inches of water from the trough to clean it up. It is dark, but it is trough cleaning day, despite the time. Perhaps the plug has disappeared because it is dark, and I cannot see it. This would seem to be the time for a flashlight, but as anyone who has had a little boy knows, a still working flashlight is not compatible.
      The water trough is a grand affair. When the kids were little they believed we had a pool, above ground to be sure, but still. It is crafted from cement, and is signed by the craftsman on the side, along with some other sort of notation. Local legend says he was a traveling concrete worker who came through these parts sometime around the turn of the 20th century. He poured the huge troughs at several farms in the area, and there is even one down the road in a cornfield- trough abandoned and full of farm waste. I should get out there with paper and a crayon and solve the mystery of when more definitively by rubbing the date on the side, but I'm too preoccupied with just keeping it clean and modestly full for the horses. If it was a trough salesman, I wonder if he also plied his craft on the other ancient, but fine, concrete structures at Cowfeathers? We have a large concrete bridge culvert for our creek which is still strong enough to hold a modern firetruck ( knowledge we have thanks to Nana's smoking dinner in the oven whilst Huz and I were out, and she didn't know the security code) , but the bridge is at least a century if not older. The dairy section of the barn is also poured concrete, and also is not new by American standards. The stanchions (the area the cow puts her head through to feed in the feed trough that slide closed to keep her reasonably stationary for hand milking) are crafted of wood and metal, quite usable still, but by no means modern in themselves! Concrete has been around since the 1750's and hasn't changed much since 1824 when Joseph Aspdin burned ground limestone with clay to create modern cement and then added aggregate to produce concrete. Cowfeathers Farm was built right around this time with the barn going up before the creation of concrete by Mister Aspdin and the house going up just after. I would surmise as there was not concrete used in the building of the house, that the concrete was poured sometime after the house was finished, or perhaps they were reluctant to use new technology in their home, but not in the barn? In any case, that water trough has been up on the hill with the barn for some years now. Beautiful utility.Hundreds of gallons.  And I've drained the water, scrubbed the bottom (don't like greenstuff) and misplaced the dang plug. So, it's buckets for the horses tonight, and great hopes for daylight.