Findings

I forgot to mention some odd findings recently.  Packing to leave Coombes Moor some oddities appeared in the garden.  A thick L-shaped iron gate bracket, perhaps snapped off and thrown to one side; heavy and rusted but still recognisable, a strong shape.  And the bowl of a clay pipe, still white and in good condition.  The history of pipes; did it once have a long stem or was it always short, strangely like a pot smoker's chillum?  The pipes designed to be smoked once and then thrown away always fascinate me, disposable Victorian  culture.  Or perhaps it was older, discarded one afternoon in the 1770s as the gang of men put the toll road through?  I remember one appeared in the garden of our house in Southport, and I think we left it there to be found by future owners.   Old clay pipes will become rarer, until no more are found and they will become collectable.  

And when the stove men put the woodburner into the old inglenook here at the cottage, they found a corroded, filthy brass button, which with a lick and a polish turns out to be a not-very-old naval button, the button off a reefer jacket perhaps.  What was it doing walled up in an eighteenth century inglenook 80 miles from the sea?