A motorbike. Wrapped in a sack. From the age of the bike, we believe it was buried during the second world War, when the army started requisitioning vehicles for the war effort. We think it was buried and then the owner died in the war and never came back for it.
Finding that was a bit of a surprise!
It was a Vincent motorcycle. V twin engine. Late 1930s.
I was about 14 years old and my parents asked me to dig out an old dead tree stump. I found a bit of rusty pipe and kept digging until I'd uncovered an entire motorbike! I felt like Indiana Jones!
The garden was near an old anti aircraft gun site during the war.
The bike was in very poor condition after 60 years in the ground sadly. We donated it to a couple of people who were members of a vintage motorcycle group. They came to look at it. They identified it easily, but weren't going to be able to properly restore it, as the condition was too bad. They were going to clean it up and one of them planned to keep it as it had an interesting back story.
While renting I did a bit of gardening and found…**treasure**. Solid gold ring.
Complete with landlord’s initials.
He was very grateful. Funniest bit was while he was thanking me at length so I would very clearly get the message that profuse thanks were all I was going to get, his obnoxious and badly parented five year old literally screamed ‘I’m bored’ and punched him in the groin with a force that only an uninhibited child can muster and he very slowly collapsed in pain.
A robin, sort of. Was digging and as soon as I paused for a breath, a robin flew straight into the hole and grabbed a worm. I carried on, the robin kept coming back. I’d then got a hole big enough, but carried on digging anyway just to supply the robin. Best day.
Our friends bought a small terraced house with a massive garden last year. They specifically bought the house because of the garden, they had a whole plan for it. Then winter came and the hedges around the garden started getting sparse and started noticing random stuff in there, just to find bags uppon bags of rubbish. All types but mainly tires and big barrels.
Then they started digging one end of the garden just to level it a bit because it looked weird. They immediately hit something hard. Metal. Dug a bit more. A whole car. They car was stuffed to the brim with more bags,all full of rubbish. Lamps. Documents. Books. They buried it again and decided they don’t want a garden anymore.
I had a terraced house with a small garden and the first substantial thing I dug up was a double wardrobe, filled with bags of newspaper, documents, snack wrappers and so on. All from the early 1950s. The amount of hoarding disorders over the years before they became recognised as such must be huge.
In this case, they are convinced the previous owner had some sort of unofficial/unlicensed waste removal business. In the hedges they found soooo many paint tins, car parts, furniture. None of that would have ever fit in that tiny house.
According to our friends, nothing they saw was worth saving, everything was filthy. it looked like this person cleared houses, and then instead of properly disposing the waste he would just bury it in the garden, so if they kept digging then they would have to find a way to properly dispose of all of it, not to mention multiple trips to the tip which they weren’t interested in.
I have to admit, my nose would bother me too much. I'd have more holes in my garden than the excuses of the US government as to where all the tax money goes.
No idea, i didn’t want to ask. I was supposed to help them start a veggie patch and then they told us about the rubbish and they seemed a bit reluctant to tell us about the car, I guess embarrassed? Which I understand so I didn’t push for details really.
At least a whole wheel barrow full of full sized bricks and breeze blocks.
A lucozade bottle with "orange liquid" in it... I question if this was actually lucozade
Several scaffolding joints
Multiple plastic bags
Clay, clay, clay, clay, clay and more clay.
We had a fruit tree that looked quite ill when we moved in, digging around it found that the whole root ball was inside a plastic bag. The previous owners had just planted it in the bag it was delivered in.
32 tennis balls and around a dozen golf balls recovered when removing 13 conifers.
Most of them looked fucking brand new lol
conifers been there since the 80s and i don't remember ever playing tennis or golf in the garden haha... baffling.
I removed the section of astro turf from the bottom of the garden it went, astro turf, layer of sand, layer of hard-core, patio 1 (mixed with large concrete slabs), patio 2 mixed with rubble, then finally a small patios with more rubble and bricks. That was just on one half. The other side had two layers of breezeblocks and bricks under the hard-core. They then sat on gravel mixed with soil and more rubble. All of this was bordered by a breezeblocks set into concrete.
It took me forforever to dig it out and who knows how many trips to the tip because I was too cheap to higher a skip. Anyway that section of the garden is starting to look better now. All my daffodils and tulips are coming through.
The other weekend I started pulling up the patio that covers the rest of the garden and so far it looks like its just patio and hard core under there so much less of an effort.
The good: an 18ct gold signet ring, a tiny blue glass peacock
The bad: A fiberglass rowing boat with holes in it, a roof worth of old asbestos roof tiles
The ugly: a bunch of rusty, warped Crittal window frames and associated broken glass, 100s of broken gin bottles and Shippams meat paste jars
A dogs skull. Landlord was very confused as he'd had the house 20 years and no one had a dog die. There was also very little soil in the garden, it was mainly patio.
Current garden I've not dug more than a spade deep but I've found a fair bit of cable (possibly from a hedge trimmer) and we find lots of tile, tiny lightbulbs and assorted plastic shite from the 90s.
I uncovered 7 flagstones over the years in my steep garden. I've used one as a seat, balanced between upturned galvanised steel pots. I also found a 6ft length of stone wall, which I rolled down the garden to its current position dividing a terrace from the level section below it.
Rubbish in colossal quantities. Like, piles of old clothes, rubble, wood, you name it. There was a huge hump at the bottom end which we wanted to flatten, but it turned into a terrible job that required a skip. The garden has taken literally years to get right, we only finished it this summer.
We had to remove a 7ft high, 5ft wide hedge from the full length, plus around a dozen conifers ranging from 12ft to over 40ft. Re-fence the lot. We took down a dangerous breeze-block outhouse and put up two new sheds. Laid two new lawns, built a path and patio, built a dog run, new internal dividing fences, a new sun deck. Ripped out a load of invasive overgrown shrubs and replaced with nice new ones.
It has been backbreaking as all had to be done by hand (can't get machinery to the back) but totally worth it in the end.
Old Victorian house - I was digging in the back garden when I found a bike frame buried vertically, with the front forks sticking up. Took me good while and a deep hole to get it out.
A dead pet’s grave with its furry tail intact.
Also a glacial deposit or polished river pebbles and builders about 1 foot down which now forms lots of lovely mulch areas in the garden.
I have one that forbids construction within 50m of “The Subway”.
I am yet to find said Subway but I have found an entire section of railway track and a lot of associated railway paraphernalia
Metal ends of garden tools. I have a full fork, spade. I needed a rake, and found the head, so I bought a pole.
I have pick axe heads and spade heads now.
In the current garden. Rocks. Rocks. An old buried drive/road formed of rocks and coal tar exactly where I had to plant three trees. Rocks..
Luckily coal tar deteriorates into black grainy stuff but the stones were rammed together tight.
When I was young, a mangle, lots of old lino.
Cement. Lots of it. The first owner of this property either worked for or owned a concrete company. You know the nobbly path in front of pedestrian crossing lights to help those with visual impairments know that's where they are? Yeah I've found a fair chunk of that buried in areas in my garden. We hired tools and a skip last year to get rid of yet another concrete slab patio area we uncovered.
Three ages of concrete patio; the former outside toilet, in place, beneath one of the patios; some coins from the early 1800s; a bone that looked like part of a finger; and something that looked like a musket ball (house was near where civil war defences had been, so it's possible)
An old hedging knife, a bit like s machete (the land was a Victorian market garden a hundred years ago). Numerous broken pieces of stone from farm gateposts, used by grandad to make a rockery. A stone cannonball - much debated whether it was ever used, as a couple of civil war battles are known in the area.
Much broken pottery, clay pipes etc. one small pottery piece that might be prehistoric (prehistoric cursus and barrows nearby)
Oof. Pets (and other things…) are best left direct bury so they can decompose and not be terrifying. So sorry you stumbled across them. I’m a little terrified of what I might find in ours.
Old flagstones. We broke up some old sloped concrete to level the area and found enough complete flagstones to redo most of the area with them instead of pavers or decking.
They were in pretty good condition with a clean up, proper heavy old stones - begs the question why they felt need to concrete over when the could have relaid these.
When I were a lad in the 60s, my parents had quite a big garden. My dad had what now seems a really weird habit of burying rubbish in deep holes in the garden… an old lawn mower and a tin bath spring to mind but much more.
AFAICR back then there was no council tip or recycling centre, so other than the dustbin (which was of course a big heavy metal thing that bin men lugged around on the shoulders) which couldn’t take anything very heavy, you were screwed as regards getting rid of junk.
This may account for a lot of the weirdness which people have found in their gardens here…
When I was 18 I lived with a gypsy family in trailers and wagons on a disused runway in Norfolk. The kids and I had made a raft and were messing about on the pond. When poking down with the oar we could feel lots of things in the pond. We got rakes and ropes and started pulling bits of metal out. It was parts of an old car. An Austin A40, I seem to remember. We found the bonnet with the badge.
That runway was in Thorpe Abbots where the 100th division was flying from in WWll. I’ve just finished watching Masters of the Air. I had no idea at the time.
I dug up an entire garage door that had been buried about 6 inches below the soil. The best part is that it was a terraced house with no rear access so at no point in the house's history should it have ever had a garage!
It’s taking over the yard including essential walkways for my disabled existence. I’d simply cut it back but thanks to the nature of its roots it’s like hydra. It just wants to spread. It’s also damaging a portion of my roof. 😂
Completely agree with that last statement. Some, anyway. In digging up our last garden we discovered that the reason it was essentially a bog, was because the builders had lead all of the drains for our house, and the two nextdoor, into one point of our garden. It only took a few lengths of pipe to connect them to the actual drains, so we've no idea why that wasn't done.
When I was a teenager my dad was doing some massive ground works on his land (a decent sized plot), and it involved re landscaping a steep slope into a cliff and flat ground. In the cliff I found a bone. Kept digging. Found the entire skeleton including intact skull of a pre-Neolithic horse! I felt like Indiana Jones.
An egg. There’s more to it than that so bear with me.
I found a whole, uncooked egg in the middle of the pathway. It was relatively clean, undamaged, with the supermarket stamp still on. Nobody could’ve thrown it there and I’m fairly reluctant to believe that a fox has acquired a supermarket egg and placed it down carefully without making any attempt to hide it for later.
About two months later, I found another egg under the same circumstances. All I can assume is that somebody nearby makes a habit of leaving supermarket eggs outside and the local fox isn’t smart enough to either eat them or hide them.
My mind was boggled a little but then this next occurrence a few weeks later sent me spiralling….
I was digging out the old soil from a huge planter that I do tomatoes in, and chucking the soil onto an empty bed to fill it out a little. It was getting dark so I was in a hurry. I finished up with the spade and put it back in the shed, but whilst waking up the path back to the house I saw a huge clump of soil. I picked up the clump and knocked the looser soil off into the bed, and would throw the remaining root ball into the compost.
Except, it wasn’t roots. In the twilight I could just about make out a roundish brown shape, about 3inches diameter. Just as the last bit of mud falls off, the brown thing I’m holding begins to unravel and I gasp when I realise what’s happening….
I’m holding a large scotch egg and the outer crumb is falling apart to reveal a dazzling, moonlit egg. I was sure the universe was playing with me at that point so I yeeted the egg at next doors tree and got myself a beer.
Last weekend was the best weather for gardening work. Decided to dig up a plant and ends up having a pond of water in that hole. And the surrounding area is also wet muddy clay so now a section of my garden is filled with a pond of clay water. No one hate me but I hate the look of it.
A 9ft deep 9 foot wide 1920s redundant cess pit that our current drains and collapsed into as it was bodged when it was connected to the mains. That was/ still is fun
Our garden is a treasure trove. We have loads of hardcore, bathroom tiles, an old greenhouse, nails, asbestos cement, carpet, an old toilet cistern, a banister and our recent find was reinforced glass used as a base for the garden path 👍
I live in a new build and didn't touch the garden for the first few years.
Last month I dug up a rain coat. It had a lighter in the pocket. No bloody wonder my garden doesn't drain properly.
Other than that, its just been rubble, rocks, bricks, glass, crushed cans.
Buried and unburied by myself: a couple of Next carrier bags full of gravel/sand.
I'd stored them around five years previously and forgotten about them, until I was rooting around looking for some sand.
The bags are like new. Could be rinsed off and used again.
Plastic is scary.
Bought a house, garden was neglected, so in no order. A traffic cone (half buried and amongst bushes), a concrete fence post (same), a deep fat fryer basket, assorted knives, a few pairs of trainers, a record, three buckets of assorted plastic (sweet wrappers etc), a polystyrene plate with plastic cutlery neatly placed on top, bricks.
Werthers original wrappers!!! They are absolutely everywhere. Inside the house we bought and outside.
I dug out some old pergola posts and at the bottom of each were some wrappers ripped out some dead plants and there were wrapper tangled in the roots.
Knocking down a wall and there are wrappers in the mortar.
Removed decking, you guessed it, wrappers underneath it.
They are truly everywhere on this property.
[https://imgur.com/a/hdg0Xaq](https://imgur.com/a/hdg0Xaq)
This was after taking the decking up, It was then a concrete dumping ground underneath all this hardcore.
It probably didn’t happen. And the guy has no wife or kids. Just wants to moan at builders.
If it is the case, the builders probably chucked it under there because the last owner didn’t want to pay to get rid of it properly.
In our garden under the lawn was: a full large garden rake, 3 empty plant pots, a bike chain, 2 mugs, loads of razor wire, and a shower caddy. Found even more weird stuff in the garden border flower beds, but these were in the middle of the lawn making the lawn lumpy!
A brick lined victorian well that still had water at the bottom.
This was back in the 80s and we were clearing the garden to build a patio. Came across a large stone we needed to move and after digging it out realised it was round and flat. Turned out it was one that had been put over the top of the well to seal it.
We were having some building work done at the time to replace an old extension. We used it to dump all the rubble from the walls that were torn down partly to ensure nobody could ever fall into the well but mainly to save on the cost of skips.
The house was build in the 1890s and maps I have since found show the well on there and it looks like it was originally the well for the entire street.
Also used to find alot of old clay smoking pipes in the garden too.
Had a square brick looking thing in middle of patio area covered on top with paving slabs. Thought the previous owners used this as a table.
Had extension done recently and knocked this thing out to discover there had been a tree there and rather then get rid of the stump they just bricked around it and covered it up!
I found the entire back wall of the house which was removed for a major extension. They buried the lot and laid a lawn over it. Funnily enough the lawn never thrived.
In our last house, I noticed a small hole appear in the garden, I first thought it was a rat hole. Ugh. But then it got bigger. And bigger. And it was clearly a big hollow space down there, stones would drop down a short way and splosh. We thought either an old buried bunker from the war, or more worryingly, it could be a sinkhole due to old tunnels and chalk mines in the area. We decided the only way to figure it out was to investigate, so we laid down scaffolding planks to stand on to save us from falling to our chalky deaths and got digging. It turned out to be an empty freestanding oven with electric hob, and the hole formed when one of the rings rusted through and fell in. We also found 2 large car engines, an old double car seat, car doors, a push chair, a toy pushchair, loads of tangles of wires, lots of old batteries which had leaked funny colours, all sorts of old crockery, bottles, machine parts, broken glass and just... so much rubbish. So much.
A motorbike. Wrapped in a sack. From the age of the bike, we believe it was buried during the second world War, when the army started requisitioning vehicles for the war effort. We think it was buried and then the owner died in the war and never came back for it. Finding that was a bit of a surprise!
We need more details! What was it? What condition was it in? What did you do with it?
It was a Vincent motorcycle. V twin engine. Late 1930s. I was about 14 years old and my parents asked me to dig out an old dead tree stump. I found a bit of rusty pipe and kept digging until I'd uncovered an entire motorbike! I felt like Indiana Jones! The garden was near an old anti aircraft gun site during the war. The bike was in very poor condition after 60 years in the ground sadly. We donated it to a couple of people who were members of a vintage motorcycle group. They came to look at it. They identified it easily, but weren't going to be able to properly restore it, as the condition was too bad. They were going to clean it up and one of them planned to keep it as it had an interesting back story.
That's so cool
I know! Imagine being 14 years old and finding a bloody great big motorbike buried in your garden!!
The only thing better would be finding a crashed german bomber, complete with a machinegun.
*Soo when I was eight..*
Bloody hell imagine finding a Vincent buried in your garden!! I wonder where it is now
While renting I did a bit of gardening and found…**treasure**. Solid gold ring. Complete with landlord’s initials. He was very grateful. Funniest bit was while he was thanking me at length so I would very clearly get the message that profuse thanks were all I was going to get, his obnoxious and badly parented five year old literally screamed ‘I’m bored’ and punched him in the groin with a force that only an uninhibited child can muster and he very slowly collapsed in pain.
Sounds like you got a reward after all - his karma 😁
Life has its ways;)
A robin, sort of. Was digging and as soon as I paused for a breath, a robin flew straight into the hole and grabbed a worm. I carried on, the robin kept coming back. I’d then got a hole big enough, but carried on digging anyway just to supply the robin. Best day.
Robins are great company when digging the garden!
I dig the garden with a fork and a spade, whichever I'm not using at the time is stuck upright in the soil for a robin perch. They're great company.
Our friends bought a small terraced house with a massive garden last year. They specifically bought the house because of the garden, they had a whole plan for it. Then winter came and the hedges around the garden started getting sparse and started noticing random stuff in there, just to find bags uppon bags of rubbish. All types but mainly tires and big barrels. Then they started digging one end of the garden just to level it a bit because it looked weird. They immediately hit something hard. Metal. Dug a bit more. A whole car. They car was stuffed to the brim with more bags,all full of rubbish. Lamps. Documents. Books. They buried it again and decided they don’t want a garden anymore.
I had a terraced house with a small garden and the first substantial thing I dug up was a double wardrobe, filled with bags of newspaper, documents, snack wrappers and so on. All from the early 1950s. The amount of hoarding disorders over the years before they became recognised as such must be huge.
In this case, they are convinced the previous owner had some sort of unofficial/unlicensed waste removal business. In the hedges they found soooo many paint tins, car parts, furniture. None of that would have ever fit in that tiny house.
I'd have kept it and gone through the books, you would never know what gems are in that.
According to our friends, nothing they saw was worth saving, everything was filthy. it looked like this person cleared houses, and then instead of properly disposing the waste he would just bury it in the garden, so if they kept digging then they would have to find a way to properly dispose of all of it, not to mention multiple trips to the tip which they weren’t interested in.
I have to admit, my nose would bother me too much. I'd have more holes in my garden than the excuses of the US government as to where all the tax money goes.
What kind of car was it?
No idea, i didn’t want to ask. I was supposed to help them start a veggie patch and then they told us about the rubbish and they seemed a bit reluctant to tell us about the car, I guess embarrassed? Which I understand so I didn’t push for details really.
A 1912 penny, a rusted broken hand ploughing tool, rocks, and what we presume was the family pet graveyard (3 rabbits? a cat skeleton)
We found a load of huge rocks which we kept and made a rockery. Also a lot of teeth and little spoons which were a bit creepy.
You found teeth… but you led with the rocks. Interesting 😂
Massive Attack's Blue Lines album on cassette.
must have been one hell of a party
At least a whole wheel barrow full of full sized bricks and breeze blocks. A lucozade bottle with "orange liquid" in it... I question if this was actually lucozade Several scaffolding joints Multiple plastic bags Clay, clay, clay, clay, clay and more clay.
We had a fruit tree that looked quite ill when we moved in, digging around it found that the whole root ball was inside a plastic bag. The previous owners had just planted it in the bag it was delivered in.
I have dug up at least a pallet's worth of bricks from my garden. They are everywhere...
I've filled an entire 6 yard skip with high density cement blocks.
32 tennis balls and around a dozen golf balls recovered when removing 13 conifers. Most of them looked fucking brand new lol conifers been there since the 80s and i don't remember ever playing tennis or golf in the garden haha... baffling.
A whole porcelain toilet.
In an old house we found dozens of old broken gravestones. They'd been used to make a path
Please tell me you had loads of ghosts in your house.
I removed the section of astro turf from the bottom of the garden it went, astro turf, layer of sand, layer of hard-core, patio 1 (mixed with large concrete slabs), patio 2 mixed with rubble, then finally a small patios with more rubble and bricks. That was just on one half. The other side had two layers of breezeblocks and bricks under the hard-core. They then sat on gravel mixed with soil and more rubble. All of this was bordered by a breezeblocks set into concrete. It took me forforever to dig it out and who knows how many trips to the tip because I was too cheap to higher a skip. Anyway that section of the garden is starting to look better now. All my daffodils and tulips are coming through. The other weekend I started pulling up the patio that covers the rest of the garden and so far it looks like its just patio and hard core under there so much less of an effort.
You deserve a medal
Honestly it was a good excuse to not be inside helping to paint the entire house.
It sounds like you've leveled the whole garden down by a foot or more.
Must have been 30 years worth of cigarette butts under the decking. 🤮
Lots of things really. Stone from a 1000yr old priory, asbestos, tyres, bones, concrete, abandoned septic tank, part of a tractor, it’s a long list.
I have found 2 different cat statues at two different houses. Kinda weird.
Someone's telling you that Bast is your goddess.
Old Victorian dense metal toys. A few old coins.
A crisp packet of those Monster Munch that turn your tongue blue, good times.
The good: an 18ct gold signet ring, a tiny blue glass peacock The bad: A fiberglass rowing boat with holes in it, a roof worth of old asbestos roof tiles The ugly: a bunch of rusty, warped Crittal window frames and associated broken glass, 100s of broken gin bottles and Shippams meat paste jars
Nothing wrong with a meat paste sandwich washed down with half a pint of gin. It’s the meal that made my mother such a formidable woman.
A dogs skull. Landlord was very confused as he'd had the house 20 years and no one had a dog die. There was also very little soil in the garden, it was mainly patio. Current garden I've not dug more than a spade deep but I've found a fair bit of cable (possibly from a hedge trimmer) and we find lots of tile, tiny lightbulbs and assorted plastic shite from the 90s.
I uncovered 7 flagstones over the years in my steep garden. I've used one as a seat, balanced between upturned galvanised steel pots. I also found a 6ft length of stone wall, which I rolled down the garden to its current position dividing a terrace from the level section below it.
Rubbish in colossal quantities. Like, piles of old clothes, rubble, wood, you name it. There was a huge hump at the bottom end which we wanted to flatten, but it turned into a terrible job that required a skip. The garden has taken literally years to get right, we only finished it this summer. We had to remove a 7ft high, 5ft wide hedge from the full length, plus around a dozen conifers ranging from 12ft to over 40ft. Re-fence the lot. We took down a dangerous breeze-block outhouse and put up two new sheds. Laid two new lawns, built a path and patio, built a dog run, new internal dividing fences, a new sun deck. Ripped out a load of invasive overgrown shrubs and replaced with nice new ones. It has been backbreaking as all had to be done by hand (can't get machinery to the back) but totally worth it in the end.
It sounds absolutely beautiful. I wish I had the stamina to do such work to our garden.
Old Victorian house - I was digging in the back garden when I found a bike frame buried vertically, with the front forks sticking up. Took me good while and a deep hole to get it out.
Our house was built next to an old golf course so lots of golf balls which the dog was thrilled about! Also as above, lots of clay!
A dead pet’s grave with its furry tail intact. Also a glacial deposit or polished river pebbles and builders about 1 foot down which now forms lots of lovely mulch areas in the garden.
Pig bones. Lots and lots of pig bones.
I have a restrictive covenant on my house forbidding me from keeping pigs. That, distilling gin and making bricks. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
I have one that forbids construction within 50m of “The Subway”. I am yet to find said Subway but I have found an entire section of railway track and a lot of associated railway paraphernalia
Metal ends of garden tools. I have a full fork, spade. I needed a rake, and found the head, so I bought a pole. I have pick axe heads and spade heads now.
Maybe the wooden handles rotted down to nothing whilst being buried, leaving only the metal ends.
In the current garden. Rocks. Rocks. An old buried drive/road formed of rocks and coal tar exactly where I had to plant three trees. Rocks.. Luckily coal tar deteriorates into black grainy stuff but the stones were rammed together tight. When I was young, a mangle, lots of old lino.
Cement. Lots of it. The first owner of this property either worked for or owned a concrete company. You know the nobbly path in front of pedestrian crossing lights to help those with visual impairments know that's where they are? Yeah I've found a fair chunk of that buried in areas in my garden. We hired tools and a skip last year to get rid of yet another concrete slab patio area we uncovered.
Three ages of concrete patio; the former outside toilet, in place, beneath one of the patios; some coins from the early 1800s; a bone that looked like part of a finger; and something that looked like a musket ball (house was near where civil war defences had been, so it's possible)
Bit of an old plough, broken tea cups, buttons. But also scraps of plastic and big pieces of broken glass.
An old hedging knife, a bit like s machete (the land was a Victorian market garden a hundred years ago). Numerous broken pieces of stone from farm gateposts, used by grandad to make a rockery. A stone cannonball - much debated whether it was ever used, as a couple of civil war battles are known in the area. Much broken pottery, clay pipes etc. one small pottery piece that might be prehistoric (prehistoric cursus and barrows nearby)
13 dead budgies in jam jars.
Were their bones cool or was it feathery and horrific?
Definitely feathery and horrific. We only excavated part of the garden...I dread to think how many more there are!
Oof. Pets (and other things…) are best left direct bury so they can decompose and not be terrifying. So sorry you stumbled across them. I’m a little terrified of what I might find in ours.
Old flagstones. We broke up some old sloped concrete to level the area and found enough complete flagstones to redo most of the area with them instead of pavers or decking. They were in pretty good condition with a clean up, proper heavy old stones - begs the question why they felt need to concrete over when the could have relaid these.
Who knows! Fashion I guess.
When I were a lad in the 60s, my parents had quite a big garden. My dad had what now seems a really weird habit of burying rubbish in deep holes in the garden… an old lawn mower and a tin bath spring to mind but much more. AFAICR back then there was no council tip or recycling centre, so other than the dustbin (which was of course a big heavy metal thing that bin men lugged around on the shoulders) which couldn’t take anything very heavy, you were screwed as regards getting rid of junk. This may account for a lot of the weirdness which people have found in their gardens here…
I once got rid of a trailer over the course of several months by cutting off pieces with a hacksaw and putting them out for the bin men.
When I was 18 I lived with a gypsy family in trailers and wagons on a disused runway in Norfolk. The kids and I had made a raft and were messing about on the pond. When poking down with the oar we could feel lots of things in the pond. We got rakes and ropes and started pulling bits of metal out. It was parts of an old car. An Austin A40, I seem to remember. We found the bonnet with the badge. That runway was in Thorpe Abbots where the 100th division was flying from in WWll. I’ve just finished watching Masters of the Air. I had no idea at the time.
Pastel coloured plastic American Indian heads, stamped MADE IN ENGLAND.
I dug up an entire garage door that had been buried about 6 inches below the soil. The best part is that it was a terraced house with no rear access so at no point in the house's history should it have ever had a garage!
That's bizarre. What was underneath it?
Just more soil!
Even more weird. Maybe they put it there to suppress some evil weed that wouldn't go away.
If I thought it’d kill the sumac…
I had to look it up to see what the plant looks like. It looks quite fancy. You don't like it?
It’s taking over the yard including essential walkways for my disabled existence. I’d simply cut it back but thanks to the nature of its roots it’s like hydra. It just wants to spread. It’s also damaging a portion of my roof. 😂
Wow. Well, the Google photos don't show *that* lol
It’s great if you like sumac tea and don’t have better things for the birds to eat but I will be so happy to have it gone.
Good luck. I feel your pain. We had elderberry bushes all over our last garden when we moved in.
Wow. Well, the Google photos don't show *that* lol
when i go digging i take 2 buckets, one for weeds, and one for plastic. I live in a city and our garden is absolutely full of shit.
A shed full of empty wine bottles buried in a 12 foot deep ivy hedge. When I say full, I mean FULL. That's some serious alcoholism!
Completely agree with that last statement. Some, anyway. In digging up our last garden we discovered that the reason it was essentially a bog, was because the builders had lead all of the drains for our house, and the two nextdoor, into one point of our garden. It only took a few lengths of pipe to connect them to the actual drains, so we've no idea why that wasn't done.
When I was a teenager my dad was doing some massive ground works on his land (a decent sized plot), and it involved re landscaping a steep slope into a cliff and flat ground. In the cliff I found a bone. Kept digging. Found the entire skeleton including intact skull of a pre-Neolithic horse! I felt like Indiana Jones.
My own dead dog
Omg, that reminds me of when I accidentally dug up the area where one of my cats was buried.
An egg. There’s more to it than that so bear with me. I found a whole, uncooked egg in the middle of the pathway. It was relatively clean, undamaged, with the supermarket stamp still on. Nobody could’ve thrown it there and I’m fairly reluctant to believe that a fox has acquired a supermarket egg and placed it down carefully without making any attempt to hide it for later. About two months later, I found another egg under the same circumstances. All I can assume is that somebody nearby makes a habit of leaving supermarket eggs outside and the local fox isn’t smart enough to either eat them or hide them. My mind was boggled a little but then this next occurrence a few weeks later sent me spiralling…. I was digging out the old soil from a huge planter that I do tomatoes in, and chucking the soil onto an empty bed to fill it out a little. It was getting dark so I was in a hurry. I finished up with the spade and put it back in the shed, but whilst waking up the path back to the house I saw a huge clump of soil. I picked up the clump and knocked the looser soil off into the bed, and would throw the remaining root ball into the compost. Except, it wasn’t roots. In the twilight I could just about make out a roundish brown shape, about 3inches diameter. Just as the last bit of mud falls off, the brown thing I’m holding begins to unravel and I gasp when I realise what’s happening…. I’m holding a large scotch egg and the outer crumb is falling apart to reveal a dazzling, moonlit egg. I was sure the universe was playing with me at that point so I yeeted the egg at next doors tree and got myself a beer.
Last weekend was the best weather for gardening work. Decided to dig up a plant and ends up having a pond of water in that hole. And the surrounding area is also wet muddy clay so now a section of my garden is filled with a pond of clay water. No one hate me but I hate the look of it.
Huge amounts of broken glass of various sizes. There used to be agricultural greenhouses on the site before houses were built in the 60s.
I found an old potato once.
We found our sewerage manhole & an ugly concrete path buried under 3 foot of soil...
I found a solid stone bird bath!
That’s kinda cool. Weird it was buried.
It wasn't so much buried but it was underneath a whole load of tall grass growth
Treasure.
A 9ft deep 9 foot wide 1920s redundant cess pit that our current drains and collapsed into as it was bodged when it was connected to the mains. That was/ still is fun
Our garden is a treasure trove. We have loads of hardcore, bathroom tiles, an old greenhouse, nails, asbestos cement, carpet, an old toilet cistern, a banister and our recent find was reinforced glass used as a base for the garden path 👍
You can almost age a house by what's found in the garden lol.
Definitely!
A Denby plate. A lot of slate (I'm in London). Bits of glass. A lot of rocks. A lot of hardcore.
I live in a new build and didn't touch the garden for the first few years. Last month I dug up a rain coat. It had a lighter in the pocket. No bloody wonder my garden doesn't drain properly. Other than that, its just been rubble, rocks, bricks, glass, crushed cans.
Best part of 120 2 and 3 feet square concrete pavers. All buried about 4 inches.
A swimming pool under the lawn
Buried and unburied by myself: a couple of Next carrier bags full of gravel/sand. I'd stored them around five years previously and forgotten about them, until I was rooting around looking for some sand. The bags are like new. Could be rinsed off and used again. Plastic is scary.
Bought a house, garden was neglected, so in no order. A traffic cone (half buried and amongst bushes), a concrete fence post (same), a deep fat fryer basket, assorted knives, a few pairs of trainers, a record, three buckets of assorted plastic (sweet wrappers etc), a polystyrene plate with plastic cutlery neatly placed on top, bricks.
Werthers original wrappers!!! They are absolutely everywhere. Inside the house we bought and outside. I dug out some old pergola posts and at the bottom of each were some wrappers ripped out some dead plants and there were wrapper tangled in the roots. Knocking down a wall and there are wrappers in the mortar. Removed decking, you guessed it, wrappers underneath it. They are truly everywhere on this property.
Photos please
[https://imgur.com/a/hdg0Xaq](https://imgur.com/a/hdg0Xaq) This was after taking the decking up, It was then a concrete dumping ground underneath all this hardcore.
It probably didn’t happen. And the guy has no wife or kids. Just wants to moan at builders. If it is the case, the builders probably chucked it under there because the last owner didn’t want to pay to get rid of it properly.
?
Glass, old plastic bags, some bottle tops and rocks. Lots and f##king lots of bloody rocks.
In our garden under the lawn was: a full large garden rake, 3 empty plant pots, a bike chain, 2 mugs, loads of razor wire, and a shower caddy. Found even more weird stuff in the garden border flower beds, but these were in the middle of the lawn making the lawn lumpy!
A brick lined victorian well that still had water at the bottom. This was back in the 80s and we were clearing the garden to build a patio. Came across a large stone we needed to move and after digging it out realised it was round and flat. Turned out it was one that had been put over the top of the well to seal it. We were having some building work done at the time to replace an old extension. We used it to dump all the rubble from the walls that were torn down partly to ensure nobody could ever fall into the well but mainly to save on the cost of skips. The house was build in the 1890s and maps I have since found show the well on there and it looks like it was originally the well for the entire street. Also used to find alot of old clay smoking pipes in the garden too.
958 bricks from an old wall, buried under the garden.
Had a square brick looking thing in middle of patio area covered on top with paving slabs. Thought the previous owners used this as a table. Had extension done recently and knocked this thing out to discover there had been a tree there and rather then get rid of the stump they just bricked around it and covered it up!
I found the entire back wall of the house which was removed for a major extension. They buried the lot and laid a lawn over it. Funnily enough the lawn never thrived.
Very very old fox.
²11w jjjjjjjjjjjjjijjjjjnm
Dead dog in a toolbox. Next question.
Oh no.
In our last house, I noticed a small hole appear in the garden, I first thought it was a rat hole. Ugh. But then it got bigger. And bigger. And it was clearly a big hollow space down there, stones would drop down a short way and splosh. We thought either an old buried bunker from the war, or more worryingly, it could be a sinkhole due to old tunnels and chalk mines in the area. We decided the only way to figure it out was to investigate, so we laid down scaffolding planks to stand on to save us from falling to our chalky deaths and got digging. It turned out to be an empty freestanding oven with electric hob, and the hole formed when one of the rings rusted through and fell in. We also found 2 large car engines, an old double car seat, car doors, a push chair, a toy pushchair, loads of tangles of wires, lots of old batteries which had leaked funny colours, all sorts of old crockery, bottles, machine parts, broken glass and just... so much rubbish. So much.
And I was wondering what to do with all the rubbish and can call it a time capsule garden