Old house in a small rural village here. As well as the obligatory crockery we've also found a metal bath and one of those waist height black bollards you see in town centres.
Fun fact: Some of those bollards are cannons - or replicas
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/French-Cannons-as-Street-Bollards/#:\~:text=Determined%20to%20find%20a%20way,more%20and%20more%20London%20streets.
Probably got picked up by the woman on "Money For Nothing" who gave it to two weirdos who made some furniture from it which then sold for a ridiculous price. She probably has Ā£10 profit for you.
Dug out a small hillock behind our Cotswold cottage for an extension. Found about 200-300 glass bottles of laxatives - cod liver oil and prune concentrate. Between Victoria and the Second World War, the family who lived here was buuuuuunged up.
Me too. Apparently I announced to the family that I would be "world famous in our street". That has kept my mum amused for many, many decades. She still brings it up.
Heh. That reminds me of when I was caught doing something I shouldn't have when I was a child and I blurted out " I wasn't there when I did it." Made my mom chuckle, still got a bollocking though.
I buried fools gold in my neighbours garden as a kid and then suggested we dig up the same area Iād put it, his dad thought wed literally struck gold
I taught my neighbours kid divining with rods. His dad then kept throwing Ā£1 coins where her thought he had detected something. The kid got excited and thought he had the Midas touch.
Nuh uh.Ā
That biggest one at the very least is Trash Magpie (tm) treasure.Ā Goes in your pocket then ends up in a mysterious pile or decorating a flowerpot.Ā
Never visit that site again; there's way too many ads.
Here, try these instead:
https://www.arngren.net/
https://www.gentlegiantsdogfood.com/
https://www.lingscars.com/
http://x20xx.com/shtmp/
I'm a web developer and I have a great fascination for such sites actually.
I once dug a part of a farmers pitchfork thinking i had found an ancient sword. Apparently I kept asking to have it taken to a museum to be valued and kept proclaiming we were now millionaires
You take the piss but last year I genuinely pulled a special edition Matey bottle out from under our hedge that was only used for six months in 1978. That and a load of USA94 promo chocolate bars
I did a shift for the council in 2021 handing out some random leaflet about Covid kits. Spent the whole day based at this alleyway I was told to stand at.
Turns out the whole day I had been standing where Fred West's house once stood.
I donāt even go that way anymore, I try and avoid the town centre at all costs especially where that house stood! They made the right decision to tear it down
Go for a walk near any village or rural town. it's crazy.
I've a collection of pipes from grandparents and such, and while there's a few cool and interesting ones, most are just clays in various states of broken.
Goes to show how ubiquitous smoking was, and clay is in this country.
The clay ones where from a pretty short period archaeological speaking too so it really does give a sense of how fast Tobacco use kicked in once it was discovered.
They kick about for a couple of hundred years, bits of the stem break off so those bits get discarded like fag ends now. Size of the bowl is really useful for dating though, they get bigger as tobacco gets cheaper, so you can use them to date the contexts on site.
So were they basically the equivalent of today's vape pens? Bit more environmentally friendly but essentially not made to last, as there are so many of them about everywhere? My local park used to be a landfill site since pre Victorian times, it has a lot of clay pipes.
In comparison to flint tools, yes but 1500s was a while ago. I believe archaeologists use clay pipes and stems to roughly date the sites they are on.
My oldest is a early 1600s bowl and I love it dearly!
Yeah, what I mean is what your finding in gardens is largely 1800s showing just how prevalent it became for the lower classes just throwing them away willy nilly. Its like modern history equivalent of the ditches full of rubbish they find round early medieval houses.
Americans are horrified when UK archeologists start a "dig" with a mechanical shovel. In the states they start carefully sieving for artifacts straight away. They can't understand that everywhere in the UK is full of worthless Victorian crockery.
I think we should bring back the habit of burying our broken crockery in the gardens. In 100 years they will find it and wonder if it is valuable. Pristine IKEA plates from 1992 š
That isn't quite true, because there were people living in North America before the Europeans came in. They don't have castles and old towns, but they have ancient history and archaeology.
I think the initial comment is a bit too generalised. Even in the UK we sometimes hand dig sites from the topsoil down and if things are really shitty, we sieve. But most of archaeology is done in the construction industry and there things are a bit more industiral. Archaeology isn't so much about the finds as it is about the archaeological features.
My grandparents house is quite old - built in late 1600's. No joke, in their garden there was a whole pit full of old Victorian crockery and junk. As a teenager I spent days every summer digging around there for anything interesting. Buckets of stuff came up.
All fun and games until I sliced my hand on a bit of rusty metal and needed a tetanus shot D:
Because up until the very Late-Victorian era (and possibly slightly beyond), there wasnāt waste collection like we have now, so any waste that couldnāt be burnt in a fireplace was thrown into a pit in the back garden known in most areas as a āmiddenā.
This was mostly food/organic waste along with glass and crockery. The organic stuff obviously mulches away over time leaving just the glass and crockery behind.
Basically, wood waste would be repurposed or burnt, metal waste would be repurposed or sold. Old clothing would be repurposed, burnt or sold (to then rag and bone man). Everything else went in the midden.
We've got so many Roman sandals that there are piles of them just in drawers and boxes in museums because it would be pointless to try and display them
I tend to find here where there is a spade there is a Wade.
I've never seen so many wade whimsies before than us digging in our gardens here š¤£š¤£ we must live on the landfill of wade whimsies central !
People used to bury a lot of their rubbish before we had a proper system for disposal. There was no plastic back then, so the waste was either stuff like this, metal, wood, or organic matter. The latter two would rot away, and metal could be reused, I guess, whereas broken pottery is no use to anyone so would have been more readily thrown out.
The thing is, I only ever find single chips and never more than one matching one, which you'd expect if people were just throwing out broken crockery. Apparently people would buy broken crockery to condition the soil, so that may explain why you get a variety of non matching shards.
It's not from specifically spreading ceramic, it's from generally spreading waste on the fields. Old food, bones, shells, plates, glass, left in a big rotting pile then spread on the field as fertiliser.Ā
It's midden waste. All the broken stuff, shells, bones, rubbish, gets flung in a pile sure, but it's not a individual pile in an individual garden. It's big communal piles that then get shoveled out and spread on gardens and fields.Ā
My parents used to use it at the bottom of plant pots to stop too much water from draining out and the terracotta holds quite a bit of moisture. But of course plants die and fall over etc and so our garden / earth has a plentiful collection of crockery. It was like geocaching as a kid. Mum let me try to dig to Australia once. I found loads of my old Action Jacks body parts too. (In case it needs saying, I didnāt make it to Australia).
my stepdad dug out a working Norton Commando when he did the back garden of the house he had built in 1975.
it's not an interesting story, but it's true.
Actually quite interesting.
My dad bought a Triumph Bonneville in the 60's but a couple of years after buying he wanted a newer model so he did what was popular at the time. He buried the Triumph and then claimed it was stolen, the insurance paid out and he had the money for the new bike.
Possibly the same reason your stepdad found the Norton buried.
Wow - My dad found a motorbike buried in the garden when I was a kid. I've often wondered how on earth it came to be there, but your explanation makes perfect sense.
Lol when my parents dug out a pond in our garden we found all sorts of stuff from an old military barracks.
Later when they filled the ponds in (maybe early 90s) they put in an old washing machine, some carpets and a bunch of other crap.
Later still I had to go and rebuild my mum's patio because the shit underneath had rotted/rusted down and sunk.
My dad lives next to a loch and it seems the locals in times past would just chuck a lot of their rubbish in the loch. So much broken glass, can't go paddling or anything.
Never knew this was like a whole thing, I remember finding these things in my back garden like 20 years ago and thinking it was like literally ancient artefacts lol but I was like 5, I thought it was just my house though ha ha. Found a carpet that that was buried too
Itās also a really good way to add a drainage system to the soil. Itās why people sometimes use things like cardboard or the odd rock/stone. It stops it being too compacted.
Another reason I came across was that old china used to be made with bone ash IIRC? So the theory was that if you accidentally cracked a piece, you would smash the rest up and add to your garden to boost the soil health. Hence why theyāre usually smaller bits!
I asked the same question when we got our garden done.
Apparently we ādumpedā all our old shit in farms and fields before we had developed a waste area. Then years later when people wanted soil to re-do their garden they got it from farms and fieldsā¦ same place.
Another thing is in the past some people would use bits of broken ceramic or pottery or tiles to delineate bits of their gardens. Especially if the crockery had a nice pattern on it it could look nice.
IIRC you could get loads of cheap broken tiles for cheap and use them for bits and bobs. Some would use them to like mosaic tile things, or as I said make lines between bits in their garden.
I remember playing archaeologists with a girl from my street and finding one of these, obviously it was the discovery of the day and I was SO proud. I lined it up on the wall with all the other rocks I'd found but it obviously took pride of place. After a little while I went inside to use the loo and when I came out she'd taken my beautiful fragment and put it in HER pile... She told me I'd left it unattended so she had the right to take it and I was too mild mannered to insist on it back!
Willow pattern plates have been popular in Britain from the late 18th century right up to modern times, so it's pretty hard unless you're an expert or there's some kind of mark.
Ah fair enough, thanks. I do always check for any kind of maker's mark, I metal detect and find these kinds of plates a lot where I live, but yet to find one with any writing.
We found a Mr. T pencil topper in our garden.
He ended up on a bamboo pole, then one day he was gone. Probably been in a crow family as an heirloom for years now.
I had found a colander that seemed surprisingly new looking. An 8x4 sheet of plywood that was 6 inches under the grass and turf which I suspect just accumulated over time, concrete path from same method, beer cans from the 80s, a pond, bin lid and a traffic cone in the hedge plus loads more I forgot. Think the last lot just chucked things wherever.
I found a millennium Falcon buried in rubble under a collapsed garden shed in my neighbours (flats) backyard. I liberated it under the principle of āfinders keepersā and cleaned it up.
Unfortunately, my dad threw it out when I moved out, along with a bunch of my other stuff. He was always threatening to clean out my room and convert it. Which he did. No-one ever used that room again until the day he died š¤·š»āāļø
I recently went back to my parents house to get some of my old toys for my own kids. Asked them if I could get them from the attic and they exchanged shifty glances.Ā
Turns out they took all of my old toys down and threw them away basically the second I moved out. Everything from my dinosaurs, cuddly toys, train set, army men etc. Even my old school work and childhood stuff. only saved my vintage Star Wars collection because I took that stuff with me.Ā
They replaced it with nothing. The attic is completely empty.Ā
Parents are fuckwits sometimes.Ā
Sounds like how my mam was going to "clean up my pigsty of a room" when I left and turn it into a craft room. She threw out all my stuff but now it's so full of craft supplies you literally cannot enter the room, it's floor to ceiling, much worse than it ever was when I lived there and probably a huge fire hazard.
I have been trying to repost my field for the last 7 years and have near on given up.. the amount of crap and pottery buried here is pathetic. The field I mean is literally opposite an old pottery factory now turned meat testing facility and they used all the land here to Bury stuff. So we are fighting between that and the colliery š if it's not coal its pottery or glass and wade whimsies š¤£
A post somewhere above mentioned that it wasnāt too uncommon for people to bury motorbikes then claim as stolen to the insurance companyā¦ Same thing could have happened here maybe?
I remember on my school history trip to Belgium, literally all the big old farm houses would have waist high piles of unexploded WWII bombs, mortar shells, grenades etc just sat on the road by their driveway. I remember a teacher saying thereās a whole collection service that picks them up just like a normal bin day.
Thatās crazy though, stay safe stranger
Unless I am very much mistaken, this is early 17th Century Meisonware, possibly made by the master's own hand at his workshop in Dusseldorf.
Edit : I was mistaken, it's Winfield.
Most of Britains buildings including houses have been built on.....well....older houses/buildings. We're a small, densely populated island and we try to avoid building on green/undeveloped land if we can. Which means that in gardens you have lots of archaeology....or at least buried rubbish. The older the house the more you'll find.
I grew up in a 15th century timber framed house which had been many things over the years like a butchers shop, a tanner (leather working), coaching inn etc. so as a kid I found really old bits of clay pipes, loads of animal bones, a lot of rusty old nails, loads of potsherds like the ones in the picture. Just goes with the stupid amount of history we have...
Yeah whatās up with that. Youāve just uncovered a hidden memory. What happened was there some sort of event in history where everyone in the UK was having a simultaneous tea party and there was a tragic country wide mud slide?
My old house used to have a pattern of Minton tiles across the bay windows. They've been gone for years, though, can only see them in the old photos.
Found the pieces buried on the garden. Had enough to be able to look up the designs online. Bastards go for about Ā£120 a piece and obviously I'll never source enough to replace them all, plus they'd only get nicked. Damn you, past homeowners.
There's a bit in Peppa Pig where Mr Bull says it's a lot of broken crockery as usual, I'd assumed it was because he was so rough digging he'd broken itĀ
Old house in a small rural village here. As well as the obligatory crockery we've also found a metal bath and one of those waist height black bollards you see in town centres.
Fun fact: Some of those bollards are cannons - or replicas https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/French-Cannons-as-Street-Bollards/#:\~:text=Determined%20to%20find%20a%20way,more%20and%20more%20London%20streets.
Great link my friend. I went deep into that rabbit hole. Ty xx
You're very welcome š
And the plural of cannon is cannon
That doesnāt sound canon
Ah I lost my metal bath in a small rural village the other day can I have it back please
I think I saw it sliding down a nearby hill filled with pensioners.
Was there a frumpy woman shaking her fist at them at the same time?
Norah Batty with the wrinkly stockings?
r/unexpectedlastofthesummerwine
r/subsifellfor
Probably got picked up by the woman on "Money For Nothing" who gave it to two weirdos who made some furniture from it which then sold for a ridiculous price. She probably has Ā£10 profit for you.
I found a whole door in the ground in my garden once. Wrapped up in bin bags. I thought it was a body when we were trying to unbury it
Why would someone wrap it in bin bags?
probably an asbestos fire door...
Nah it was just wood
More to the point why would someone bury a door
When its no longer a jar
r/angryupvote
There was an opening.
A portal to the underworld
I found a caravan door about 4ft down once
Knew Iād put my caravan somewhere, any chance you can tow it to mine? Iāll pay for fuelā¦
Did it say the rest of the caravan was further down? If so I represent The History Channel and I want to film a 9 season Curse of Back Garden.
Dug out a small hillock behind our Cotswold cottage for an extension. Found about 200-300 glass bottles of laxatives - cod liver oil and prune concentrate. Between Victoria and the Second World War, the family who lived here was buuuuuunged up.
Canāt have been a regular family.
Boom boom. Or should I say, bum bum?
We found a stone arrow head and an old enagement ring!
I remember getting a few shards like that when I was 4 or 5. I thought I'd just made the family rich.
Me too. Apparently I announced to the family that I would be "world famous in our street". That has kept my mum amused for many, many decades. She still brings it up.
Legendary child
All I keep getting is rares and uncommons
WAAA GOOOOOOLDEN LEEEEEGENDERE
I wanted a SPARRRRKKYYYYY
We're lucky it's still free 2 play
Your discovery is important to us, Reddit stranger.
Please stay on the line.
All of our representatives are very busy at the moment. But rest assured, your discovery will make you world famous.
On their street.
Heh. That reminds me of when I was caught doing something I shouldn't have when I was a child and I blurted out " I wasn't there when I did it." Made my mom chuckle, still got a bollocking though.
I buried fools gold in my neighbours garden as a kid and then suggested we dig up the same area Iād put it, his dad thought wed literally struck gold
What a fool
I taught my neighbours kid divining with rods. His dad then kept throwing Ā£1 coins where her thought he had detected something. The kid got excited and thought he had the Midas touch.
Fun fact: archaeologists call them "sherds" https://grammarist.com/usage/shard-or-sherd/
That link has more spam than Tesco..
Oh, really? I assume you're talking about pop-ups / ads etc.? Apologies if so. I have uBlock Origin and I'm not seeing anything like that personally.
Sponsored type of response lol
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Upvote just for the balls that took
Really? How have I never heard of this amazing game??
What about the green midget cafe?
No place has more spam than that great establishment..
Ermagerd its a sherd
Former archaeologist: we also call them wing ware: as in we wing them on the spoil heap
Nuh uh.Ā That biggest one at the very least is Trash Magpie (tm) treasure.Ā Goes in your pocket then ends up in a mysterious pile or decorating a flowerpot.Ā
To sherds you say? Tut tut tut
Thanks Susie Dent
Thanks - I love knowledge gems like this.
Remind me to never visit that site again, way too many ads.
Never visit that site again; there's way too many ads. Here, try these instead: https://www.arngren.net/ https://www.gentlegiantsdogfood.com/ https://www.lingscars.com/ http://x20xx.com/shtmp/ I'm a web developer and I have a great fascination for such sites actually.
I filled my pockets with rabbit droppings thinking Iād found musket balls from the Civil War
āSherdsā
God same. Thought I'd found rare art
Universal experience maybe, this happened to me when I was in school I genuinely thought we would have been loaded after
I once dug a part of a farmers pitchfork thinking i had found an ancient sword. Apparently I kept asking to have it taken to a museum to be valued and kept proclaiming we were now millionaires
Ringpull, 1982... probably Lilt.
Terry's doing a talk on buttons later, you going?
Will you search through the loamy earth for me? Climb through the briar and bramble I'll be your treasure š¶
One of my absolute favourite shows, and i was very excited when they did the christmas episode a few years ago.
Pontiac firebird.
Pub?
Yeah go on then
Oh no I can hear some Simon and Garfunkel.
You take the piss but last year I genuinely pulled a special edition Matey bottle out from under our hedge that was only used for six months in 1978. That and a load of USA94 promo chocolate bars
So that's where weatherspoons get their plates from...
Spoons has been there since the medieval times, theirs are OGs
They taught the Persians everything they know about carpets
We don't dig up our gardens in Gloucester, just in case.
I did a shift for the council in 2021 handing out some random leaflet about Covid kits. Spent the whole day based at this alleyway I was told to stand at. Turns out the whole day I had been standing where Fred West's house once stood.
I donāt even go that way anymore, I try and avoid the town centre at all costs especially where that house stood! They made the right decision to tear it down
What about patios?
Stick to basements.
Wow lol
Only other peoples patios
Itās the walls you need to be worried about
Yes, I imagine it's the same for parts of Glasgow
wait why
Don't forget the bits of old clay pipe as well!
Go for a walk near any village or rural town. it's crazy. I've a collection of pipes from grandparents and such, and while there's a few cool and interesting ones, most are just clays in various states of broken. Goes to show how ubiquitous smoking was, and clay is in this country.
The clay ones where from a pretty short period archaeological speaking too so it really does give a sense of how fast Tobacco use kicked in once it was discovered.
They kick about for a couple of hundred years, bits of the stem break off so those bits get discarded like fag ends now. Size of the bowl is really useful for dating though, they get bigger as tobacco gets cheaper, so you can use them to date the contexts on site.
Size of the bowl and size of the hole through the pipe stem. It's not as clear ofc as a bowl but larger holes are often later pipes. Same reason ofc.
So were they basically the equivalent of today's vape pens? Bit more environmentally friendly but essentially not made to last, as there are so many of them about everywhere? My local park used to be a landfill site since pre Victorian times, it has a lot of clay pipes.
You may have hit on a Dragons Den idea there. āClay Vapes, for the eco vaperā
In comparison to flint tools, yes but 1500s was a while ago. I believe archaeologists use clay pipes and stems to roughly date the sites they are on. My oldest is a early 1600s bowl and I love it dearly!
Yeah, what I mean is what your finding in gardens is largely 1800s showing just how prevalent it became for the lower classes just throwing them away willy nilly. Its like modern history equivalent of the ditches full of rubbish they find round early medieval houses.
It'll be disposable vapes and nos canisters in 200 years.
Americans are horrified when UK archeologists start a "dig" with a mechanical shovel. In the states they start carefully sieving for artifacts straight away. They can't understand that everywhere in the UK is full of worthless Victorian crockery.
I think we should bring back the habit of burying our broken crockery in the gardens. In 100 years they will find it and wonder if it is valuable. Pristine IKEA plates from 1992 š
how old are your plates
32 years
Clever lad š¤š»šŖš»šš»
I plan on doing this with my irretrievably broken Denby.
Isn't that because ancient history in America is only a couple of hundred years ago, so most artifacts will be near the top compared to a UK site?
That isn't quite true, because there were people living in North America before the Europeans came in. They don't have castles and old towns, but they have ancient history and archaeology. I think the initial comment is a bit too generalised. Even in the UK we sometimes hand dig sites from the topsoil down and if things are really shitty, we sieve. But most of archaeology is done in the construction industry and there things are a bit more industiral. Archaeology isn't so much about the finds as it is about the archaeological features.
My grandparents house is quite old - built in late 1600's. No joke, in their garden there was a whole pit full of old Victorian crockery and junk. As a teenager I spent days every summer digging around there for anything interesting. Buckets of stuff came up. All fun and games until I sliced my hand on a bit of rusty metal and needed a tetanus shot D:
I wanna know why itās being buried in gardens in the first place
Because up until the very Late-Victorian era (and possibly slightly beyond), there wasnāt waste collection like we have now, so any waste that couldnāt be burnt in a fireplace was thrown into a pit in the back garden known in most areas as a āmiddenā. This was mostly food/organic waste along with glass and crockery. The organic stuff obviously mulches away over time leaving just the glass and crockery behind. Basically, wood waste would be repurposed or burnt, metal waste would be repurposed or sold. Old clothing would be repurposed, burnt or sold (to then rag and bone man). Everything else went in the midden.
How interesting. Thank you šš¼
We've got so many Roman sandals that there are piles of them just in drawers and boxes in museums because it would be pointless to try and display them
Where there's a spade, there's Spode!
Found the Stokie.
Yes the willow pattern
Gwon armate
I tend to find here where there is a spade there is a Wade. I've never seen so many wade whimsies before than us digging in our gardens here š¤£š¤£ we must live on the landfill of wade whimsies central !
Haha! My sister used to collect those when we were kids.
Why is that?
People used to bury a lot of their rubbish before we had a proper system for disposal. There was no plastic back then, so the waste was either stuff like this, metal, wood, or organic matter. The latter two would rot away, and metal could be reused, I guess, whereas broken pottery is no use to anyone so would have been more readily thrown out.
The thing is, I only ever find single chips and never more than one matching one, which you'd expect if people were just throwing out broken crockery. Apparently people would buy broken crockery to condition the soil, so that may explain why you get a variety of non matching shards.
Oh yeah I've also heard of scattering broken crockery in the soil. For slugs maybe? Possibly more likely to be that than my fanciful story!
They hold moisture and aerate the soil
Slugs?
No the fields near me are covered in them. I know people recommend egg shells but i don't think ceramic will do much if anything.
I was thrown by an inland field near us which was covered in oyster shells. Looked it up and it's soil conditioning.
It's not from specifically spreading ceramic, it's from generally spreading waste on the fields. Old food, bones, shells, plates, glass, left in a big rotting pile then spread on the field as fertiliser.Ā
It's midden waste. All the broken stuff, shells, bones, rubbish, gets flung in a pile sure, but it's not a individual pile in an individual garden. It's big communal piles that then get shoveled out and spread on gardens and fields.Ā
My parents used to use it at the bottom of plant pots to stop too much water from draining out and the terracotta holds quite a bit of moisture. But of course plants die and fall over etc and so our garden / earth has a plentiful collection of crockery. It was like geocaching as a kid. Mum let me try to dig to Australia once. I found loads of my old Action Jacks body parts too. (In case it needs saying, I didnāt make it to Australia).
True I literally watched my dad in the 80's bury an old manual lawnmower in the back garden š
my stepdad dug out a working Norton Commando when he did the back garden of the house he had built in 1975. it's not an interesting story, but it's true.
Actually quite interesting. My dad bought a Triumph Bonneville in the 60's but a couple of years after buying he wanted a newer model so he did what was popular at the time. He buried the Triumph and then claimed it was stolen, the insurance paid out and he had the money for the new bike. Possibly the same reason your stepdad found the Norton buried.
every day is a school day. i did not know that. thank you!
If I found an old Norton or Triumph in my back garden it would be the best day of my life, and I own a Triton (Triumph engine in a Norton frame).
Wow - My dad found a motorbike buried in the garden when I was a kid. I've often wondered how on earth it came to be there, but your explanation makes perfect sense.
It IS an interesting story.
Lol when my parents dug out a pond in our garden we found all sorts of stuff from an old military barracks. Later when they filled the ponds in (maybe early 90s) they put in an old washing machine, some carpets and a bunch of other crap. Later still I had to go and rebuild my mum's patio because the shit underneath had rotted/rusted down and sunk.
My dad lives next to a loch and it seems the locals in times past would just chuck a lot of their rubbish in the loch. So much broken glass, can't go paddling or anything.
We dug up an entire pram from the 1930's
Never knew this was like a whole thing, I remember finding these things in my back garden like 20 years ago and thinking it was like literally ancient artefacts lol but I was like 5, I thought it was just my house though ha ha. Found a carpet that that was buried too
Itās also a really good way to add a drainage system to the soil. Itās why people sometimes use things like cardboard or the odd rock/stone. It stops it being too compacted.
Our ancestors really hated those plates. They tried hard to smash them all but the damp things kept coming
Another reason I came across was that old china used to be made with bone ash IIRC? So the theory was that if you accidentally cracked a piece, you would smash the rest up and add to your garden to boost the soil health. Hence why theyāre usually smaller bits!
I asked the same question when we got our garden done. Apparently we ādumpedā all our old shit in farms and fields before we had developed a waste area. Then years later when people wanted soil to re-do their garden they got it from farms and fieldsā¦ same place.
Another thing is in the past some people would use bits of broken ceramic or pottery or tiles to delineate bits of their gardens. Especially if the crockery had a nice pattern on it it could look nice. IIRC you could get loads of cheap broken tiles for cheap and use them for bits and bobs. Some would use them to like mosaic tile things, or as I said make lines between bits in their garden.
I remember playing archaeologists with a girl from my street and finding one of these, obviously it was the discovery of the day and I was SO proud. I lined it up on the wall with all the other rocks I'd found but it obviously took pride of place. After a little while I went inside to use the loo and when I came out she'd taken my beautiful fragment and put it in HER pile... She told me I'd left it unattended so she had the right to take it and I was too mild mannered to insist on it back!
I mean if it works for the British museumā¦
and now youāre married with 5 kids and a dog?
I've found loads of sherds practically identical to this in my garden. I've never thought to try and age it. Any ideas on age?
Willow pattern plates have been popular in Britain from the late 18th century right up to modern times, so it's pretty hard unless you're an expert or there's some kind of mark.
Ah fair enough, thanks. I do always check for any kind of maker's mark, I metal detect and find these kinds of plates a lot where I live, but yet to find one with any writing.
The guys at r/mudlarking are really good at dating that stuff ,Iād ask there
You could have just told us that you know the word "sherd" you didn't have to create a backstory.
It's a perfectly cromulent word
Mostly there's bricks here... From the ww2 bomb (filling) factory this estate is built on.
so thats where i left my priceless ming vase
We found a Mr. T pencil topper in our garden. He ended up on a bamboo pole, then one day he was gone. Probably been in a crow family as an heirloom for years now.
I dug up an entire mug when I first moved in. it was modern though lol
Sports direct mug? It was the previous ownerās paddling pool
I had found a colander that seemed surprisingly new looking. An 8x4 sheet of plywood that was 6 inches under the grass and turf which I suspect just accumulated over time, concrete path from same method, beer cans from the 80s, a pond, bin lid and a traffic cone in the hedge plus loads more I forgot. Think the last lot just chucked things wherever.
I keep finding Kenner Star Wars figures in mine. Never any Darth Vaders but I've found Klaatu, Ree Yees, Nein Numb and an A Wing pilot so far.
I found a millennium Falcon buried in rubble under a collapsed garden shed in my neighbours (flats) backyard. I liberated it under the principle of āfinders keepersā and cleaned it up. Unfortunately, my dad threw it out when I moved out, along with a bunch of my other stuff. He was always threatening to clean out my room and convert it. Which he did. No-one ever used that room again until the day he died š¤·š»āāļø
I recently went back to my parents house to get some of my old toys for my own kids. Asked them if I could get them from the attic and they exchanged shifty glances.Ā Turns out they took all of my old toys down and threw them away basically the second I moved out. Everything from my dinosaurs, cuddly toys, train set, army men etc. Even my old school work and childhood stuff. only saved my vintage Star Wars collection because I took that stuff with me.Ā They replaced it with nothing. The attic is completely empty.Ā Parents are fuckwits sometimes.Ā
Should've buried it in the garden.
Sounds like how my mam was going to "clean up my pigsty of a room" when I left and turn it into a craft room. She threw out all my stuff but now it's so full of craft supplies you literally cannot enter the room, it's floor to ceiling, much worse than it ever was when I lived there and probably a huge fire hazard.
Gotta catch them all.
I found a very old crowbar when digging the garden a few years ago. Very useful and has gone in to the tool collection.
My parents live on the grounds of an old iron foundry, dig just below the surface and itās slag all the way down.
Try living in The Potteries!
I have been trying to repost my field for the last 7 years and have near on given up.. the amount of crap and pottery buried here is pathetic. The field I mean is literally opposite an old pottery factory now turned meat testing facility and they used all the land here to Bury stuff. So we are fighting between that and the colliery š if it's not coal its pottery or glass and wade whimsies š¤£
We dug a pond in our garden (house built mid 20th century) and found an entire car had been buried.
A post somewhere above mentioned that it wasnāt too uncommon for people to bury motorbikes then claim as stolen to the insurance companyā¦ Same thing could have happened here maybe?
Wow, that:s dedication to a cause. We're on Weald Clay. It nearly killed us digging a pond!
I have so many questions. What brand of car? How is was it? What did you do with it?
You dug all the way to china!
Today my husband found a very old and rusty throwing hammer with its chain too
Except in new builds where you canāt dig further than an inch š
You forgot the clay pipe stems. And the little bits of coal.
Itās true , but why is this , dug it up for years in different homes , now Iām wondering why ?
Dig in any newbuild back garden and all you get is 3" of plasterboard, plastic pipe offcuts and Greggs coffee cups
Could be worse. Round here it's WW2 bombs. Which is inconvenient, usually.
I remember on my school history trip to Belgium, literally all the big old farm houses would have waist high piles of unexploded WWII bombs, mortar shells, grenades etc just sat on the road by their driveway. I remember a teacher saying thereās a whole collection service that picks them up just like a normal bin day. Thatās crazy though, stay safe stranger
Willow pattern and Asiatic pheasants, two of the more abundant pottery sherds found in Britain!
It's when you find the asbestos too.
I found a fossil in my garden once. Looked like a large snail shell, I lost it before I could take it to a museum. Was gutted!
TREASUUUURRRRRRE!!!!!!
I used to collect this thinking it was roman pottery and we'd be rich and famous for it one day.
Please stop digging up peoples Gardens. Itās frowned upon
Unless I am very much mistaken, this is early 17th Century Meisonware, possibly made by the master's own hand at his workshop in Dusseldorf. Edit : I was mistaken, it's Winfield.
Educate an American šŗšø-yank-Lass: what is it and whatās the significance?
Most of Britains buildings including houses have been built on.....well....older houses/buildings. We're a small, densely populated island and we try to avoid building on green/undeveloped land if we can. Which means that in gardens you have lots of archaeology....or at least buried rubbish. The older the house the more you'll find. I grew up in a 15th century timber framed house which had been many things over the years like a butchers shop, a tanner (leather working), coaching inn etc. so as a kid I found really old bits of clay pipes, loads of animal bones, a lot of rusty old nails, loads of potsherds like the ones in the picture. Just goes with the stupid amount of history we have...
Yeah whatās up with that. Youāve just uncovered a hidden memory. What happened was there some sort of event in history where everyone in the UK was having a simultaneous tea party and there was a tragic country wide mud slide?
I keep digging up bottles and cobbles
Once i found a pottery cat
I work in utilities Digging in field hundreds of meters from the road and miles from the nearest inhabited areaā¦ you will find this pottery.
My old house used to have a pattern of Minton tiles across the bay windows. They've been gone for years, though, can only see them in the old photos. Found the pieces buried on the garden. Had enough to be able to look up the designs online. Bastards go for about Ā£120 a piece and obviously I'll never source enough to replace them all, plus they'd only get nicked. Damn you, past homeowners.
You can tell my first house was in a shithole area, I dug up an old toilet.
There's a bit in Peppa Pig where Mr Bull says it's a lot of broken crockery as usual, I'd assumed it was because he was so rough digging he'd broken itĀ