Treasure under the window seat!

First thing Tuesday morning and the builders are starting to level the flag stone floor in the sitting room just under the window seat. All work stops as we start to find old coins and buttons and endless bits of old pottery. We call our Architect, who immediately comes over with his metal detector again.

Underneath the window seat there is a cavity that is filled with rubble, dirt, a mass of cobwebs and tree roots. From out of this falls decades of items that have fallen out of people’s pockets and down the back of the window seat. An old version of losing pound coins down the back of the sofa!

We are all sifting through the dirt finding seemingly endless amounts of treasure! Masses of pins, buttons and glass beads are revealed, as if someone spilled the contents of their sewing basket down the back of the seat. By this time we have a paint pot and it’s filling up rapidly with our finds.

Our haul included; all periods and colours of pottery, old window glass, beautiful coloured glass beads, buttons of every age and variety, Victorian and Georgian coins, lots of old lead pencils, scraps of newspaper (including a cut out caricature and one detailing a lady being diagnosed with Consumption), a metal comb, a spoon broken in two, leather straps, hundreds of pins, safety pins, and various metal items we cannot identify, and a strange leather disk.