Whats the strangest thing youve ever dug up ?

The previous tenant to us has lefta very strange mix of things in the soil. SIM cards, mobile phones, empty tubs of protein powder, tinsel, spoons, to name those I can recall digging up in the past year
Why he didn't just throw these things in the dustbin I cannot understand (apart from, maybe, the SIM card and phone)
Tinsel was a real pain as it had disintegrated and is now 6000 bits of tinsel all blowing around the garden

 

I have just remembered I have dug up, on the allotment, a couple of half interesting things, a copper coin like token stated as a "work woman's pass" which I believe allowed free bus travel on local buses for women who were working for the war effort in WW1, it had the holders name stamped on it, and a couple of metal inserts to barrels that were, I think, Whitbread's Brewery in the town, but obviously dating back to the old days of wooden barrels.

 

I bet your local history museum would love to have the bus pass token @pete, if you've still got it and are prepared to part with it. An unusual survival, and really handy for a display about the local war effort (says the ex-museum curator).

 

Do you think so, this is it,


Got the Brewery wrong on the barrel inserts, it Fremlins not Whitbread.

 

Absolutely, do get in touch with Maidstone Museums. Send them those photos and see what they say. With a bit of research they might even be able to find out who the original user was, and what war work she was doing!

 

Yes I suppose I should really, its strange but I was at the local post office collection office a couple of years ago and they had a kind of plaque on the wall and it was post office workers who died in the army during WW1, and there was a Maytum on the list, presumably, or possibly, a relative of the holder of this token, maybe.

 

It's a distinctive surname - not one I'd heard before, but local to Kent according to ancestry.

 

That's interesting, it isn't a name I had ever come across until I found this, but also interesting that its a kind of Kentish name, or at least originated here.

 

hi

in one of my previous houses I was digging along the drive and found a yellow pipe and hacked at it with my spade ... turned out to be the gas pipe

as you can see I lived to tell the tale

 

The Dinosaur's bone will remain part of the family history.

It all started at my Grandparents' plot when we built a new loo and dismantled the old shed-outhouse- whatnot.

Somewhere deep down in the bowels of the earth there was a bone joint the size of a football that my dog Mitja discovered.

She didn't get much sleep that summer, trying to optimise a place to store the magnificent find. A very large hole was dug into the roots of a horrible Potentilla I had tried to kill for years, resulting into spectacular flowering the next summer

In the end, we threw the Dinosaur's bone on the garage roof to have some peace and quiet and to allow the poor dog to get some sleep.

The next summer when we arrived, Mitja the Dog was released and within minutes she came in so incredibly happy, with the Dinosaur's bone from last year.

Hiding place optimisation and severe hole digging continued all summer, and when it was time to return to city in the autumn, the bone was carefully hidden amongst the firewood logs.

No prizes of guessing what happened the summer after.

The lovely thing is that 20 years after, I took my husband and our 2- year old child to the plot, and guess what was under the Blackcurrant bush.

Mitja's Dinosaur's bone.

 

We have been in our house since 1978. One area we developed into a veg plot. Over the years this changed and we transferred black/red/white currant bushes, gooseberry bushes and Kiwi plants. Last year we came across this small lead "jug". It is only about 3cms tall. No idea how it came to be in this spot.

 

Maybe from the furnishings of a doll house?

 

I found this last year after spreading a delivery of farmyard manure. A nice way of authenticating the source.

 

It doesn’t really count because I found this in the alley at the back of my parents’ garden in London. Occasionally they pop up on eBay with a price of multiple 00s of £s.