|
Posted by Kris Krieger on May 28, 2008, 5:51 pm
>
> Gone a bit OT but never mind ...
>
> [snip]
>
>>> I broke a tile trying to lever a
>>> hearthstone up - using a tracklayers bar I found buried in the back
>>> yard. Where I also found a motor bike buried. When the railway
>>> workshops closed, anything not screwed down disappeared apparently.
>>
>> Buried, huh. I guess it's one way to get stuff out of sight when one
> no
>> longer wahts it. Sort of like buried treasure for later inhabitants
>> ;)
>>
>> It makes sense in a way that people would take whatever trhey could
> use,
>> onc somethign is abandoned. In a way, it's sad, becasue it's hard to
>> piece together the history afterwards, but one can't say it isn't
>> *practical*.
>
> In a way - but in WW2 the local Home Guard were given a box of hand
> grenades which didn't get handed back at the end of the war.
>
> Found the hard way by a farmer's plough. He survived but the plough
> was scattered everywhere ...
Holy cow... ;)
I saw some clips re: people (builders, excavators, etc.) still finding
unexploded bombs in London. Scary stuff.
>
> Another questionable practice - numerous drums of railway-issue
> bitumen squirelled away in the attics of the houses. Not too bad maybe
> - unless there was a fire. The fire-separating walls in the roofspaces
> had all been knocked through to install electric cable, hadn't been
> bricked up again, so if one house had gone up the rest would have been
> history.
=:-o
It's one thing to use discarded stuff that's useable, but it's a bit
crazy to keep soem stuff. OTOH, took a couple years to break my
styrofoam meat tray thing (used to run 'em through the dishwasher and
stack them in the garage...), so I can't make *too* much fon of
"collectors" <ahem!!>
>>
>>>
>>>> THe boiler ash part also is interesting. THe building that was
>>>> described sounded like an interesting thing overall.
>>>
>>> The place was thought to be a bit rough. Paid 3,500 sterling for the
>>> house in 1978. Sold up in '86 for about 2.5 times what we paid for
>>> it. The terraces are probably heritage listed by now and worth a
>>> bomb ...
>>>
>>> There had been a Roman fort just up the slope above the tavern, and
>>> Llewelyn, last Prince of Wales, was buried just up the road a bit.
>>> (Well his body was apparently. His head was sent to London.)
>>>
>>
>> THat's the thing that amazes be about Europe and Asia, the thousands
>> of years of history that can turn up almost (sometimes?) literally in
>> one's back yard.
>
> I sort of miss it in way, but it was often a problem - every time a
> job involved digging a hole.there was always a chance of finding
> something, then everything being put on hold until the archeologists
> finished checking it out. Human remains anywhere meant an inspection
> by the Coroner. I was on a job once where we found the skeletons of 5
> dead miners in a drift mine shaft. We knew they'd been there a while
> as there were cages with canary bones in them. So whatever it was, gas
> or a tunnel collapse, had happened before the miner's safety lamp was
> invented, about 1832. Also found a Roman septic (wastewater) system.
> Pattern of stone arched tunnels a few feet down, near the site of a
> Roman fort. Still in good order and operational. When a farmhouse was
> built centuries later on the same site, they must have found the old
> ceramic pipes, and connected their ablution facilities into them.
A bit bizarre but also interesting to read about (tho' I wouldn't be very
interested in finding human remains under my foundation...)
>
> Charnel pits would get exposed from time to time - places where the
> victims of Beubonic Plague were buried - hundreds of them at a time.
Not very pleasant. But historic (?historical?) I guess...
>
>> The Americas were settled so mocu more recently, and worse, much of
>> what there was of the first cultures was obliterated - a lot of the
>> things they made and used, of course, were also ephemeral.
>
> Similarly here in Australia. But here in Townsville we have General
> McArthur's bunker, complete with operations room and metre-thick
> concrete walls. Still in good shape - part of my department's offices
> are there, and the bunker is used by the Council for storing files.
Doug's DUgout, eh? ;) Kind of interesting tho'.
>
> There are places on the coast north of here where there are miniature
> under-sea mountains built entirely of jeeps, trucks, etc - pushed over
> the side of supply ships.
>
One would think that'd have dire effects on the sea life. But don't a
lot of sunken ships and so on, even metal warships, get turned into reefs
by sea critters...? I guess it might be interesting to scuba dive around
some of thiose, to see both what people discarded, and the abodes that
sea critters turn it into.
(I often think I'd like to havea long visit in Australia - but I'm afraid
I'd never want to leave once I got there ;) )
| 
Yahoo! 
Google 
Windows Live 
del.icio.us 
digg 
Netscape 
XML Sitemap