A strange discovery
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Cottage tales | 14 comments
Photo: Underground wall
Today I decided to do my digging in the morning.
There seemed to be many more bricks this time. Three barrow loads to a square meter. I was day dreaming about digging up buried treasure. Then I dug up some hefty, rotten logs. These uncovered a paving slab. Suddenly things were looking interesting. Why would someone bury a paving slab under a lawn?
I prised up the slab with my fork to reveal a brick wall buried under the earth. There was no mortar between the bricks and an old drain pipe was set into the bottom of the wall.
Feeling like a latter day Howard Carter, I rushed up to the Rat Room to announce my discovery. Danny padded down in his slippers to examine the wall.
Ages ago when a young lad visited me claiming that the cottage belonged to him, he mentioned that there had been a cellar.
“It constantly flooded. So in the end they blocked it up.”
We believed he was right. Certainly this winter the kitchen was unbelievably cold. We imagined a large block of frozen water under the kitchen floor. Most of the houses around here have a cellar. They have a tendency to flood and this can be resolved by putting a sump pump in the floor – these pumps are not very expensive and do the job well.
When I asked the lad where the entrance to the cellar was he waved his hand vaguely into the garden. There’s a small concrete area next to the barn where I assumed the entrance had been.
Was I looking at a wall of the cellar this morning? During my afternoon rest I considered filling in the hole with the ballast that I had dug up and growing short rooted plants in the area. But this evening I resolved to investigate further. I’ve never been very happy about living over a flooded cellar.
A dry cellar could be very useful for storing root vegetables in the winter. Or would I be opening up a can of worms?
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How exciting. I think you need to wait for a sunny day make yourself a picnic and grab a few bottles of ginger beer and head off with Timmy the dog (in case of danger) on a famous five style adventure.
Failing that you might be able to get some information from your local planners office on what was there in the past.
Just be careful, get a few friends in to do the digging, it’s worth investigating, if you don’t you will always be wondering.
Don’t risk it- sometimes it is best to leave things alone. We have a cellar under our house that was filled in years ago. As much as having a cellar would be useful i would definitely not consider having a look. I daren’t even look under the carpets in this house because I afraid of what horrors I will find and then have to deal with (time, money, anguish!!) Old houses have pasts which are often best left undiscovered! Sorry to be a pary pooper!
ditto from me too!!
We have found nothing interesting on our land at all ; it is such heavy clay that nothing would sink into it at all!!
Can’t wait for the next chapter – just please be careful.
Hmmm, it would be interesting to see what’s under there for sure! How intriguing!
Root cellar! Root cellar! Especially if sump pumps aren’t expensive!
talk about a cliff hanger! can’t wait to find out what happens… 🙂
I would be VERY careful and want a structural engineer to give it a clean bill of health before I went into what could collapse and trap you – but I suffer from claustrophobia so perhaps my view is a little biased!
Fiona, what fun !!!! From your photo it doesn’t look as though the wall forms part of a modern soakaway because the bricks are not placed with spaces in between BUT if there is no mortar between the bricks it would be unlikely that the wall was meant to form part of a permanent structure, ie an entrance to a cellar ! So, I think it is a sort of diy soakaway, especially since a pipe is set into the bottom of it. Perhaps it is a soakaway designed to take away some of the water which used to collect in your cellar…is your cellar blocked up or filled in ? I think some further chats with the little boy are called for, or with your neighbours – how do they access their cellars ?
Funnily enough, all our neighbours have cellars but we don’t – not anymore anyway. Sometime in the 1850s extensive modernization occurred here and our cellar was filled in, much to my great sadness. I have fantasies of digging all the soil out especially when I know that all the cellars in our road are interconnected and end up at the top of the road at our house and, for what purpose ?
Well, let me tell you…. Watchet had a thriving smuggling concern going on in the 18th century and the contaband goods would be passed up to the house at the top of the road where they would be dealt with – one way or another ! Apparently, the harbour master was the chief orchestrator but the whole town was in on it.
Somebody split on them and the Government sent a team of Customs & Excise investigators on the long journey to the West Country. They hung the fear of the gallows over the town and made an arrest or two, but I don’t think the smuggling stopped.
Sometimes I fancy I can hear the shuffling of heavy boots, the stifled whispers of weary men and the glug glug glug of French Brandy !
My husband says it’s just our old labradog shuffling and snoring in the dead of night. Well, okay…whatever…if that makes him happy…but I know a glug when I hear one, trust me !!!
Don’t stop digging !
Dee
Glad you mentioned the sump pump, I have only been thinking today about how our cellar for our apartment building could do with draining and keeping dry but wasn’t sure how. Now I have something to investigate.
We have found some strange items on our land, has something to do with being in the middle of a battle during World War 2, found a gas mask, a rusty rifle (not usable thank goodness) and various other paraphernalia.