Digging up the past

The barn was around 200 years old when we bought it and already in an advanced state of decay. Sometimes during the long hard process of converting it into a house I’d stop and wonder what its original builders would have thought of the idea.

The barn had been built to house cattle; this much we knew from the large wooden manger that was still clinging on at one end of one of the gables. At some point, the full double height building had also been divided horizontally into two. We took a guess that the new upper level had been used to store grain in an attempt to make it just that little bit harder for the rats to get at it. The floor boards on the top storey were reinforced with iron strips to help deal with the loading. That part had worked, although the presence of deep and multi-generational rats’ nests in the walls confirmed that only rodents with vertigo had been deterred by the effort.

The long since abandoned rats’ nests and the manger were not the only signs of previous habitation. Tucked here and there behind rafters or floorboards were more human signs; rusty tobacco tins and ancient empty bottles, irregularly shaped of thick green tinted glass and with a marble caught in the throat, showed us where weary farm hands had taken their ginger beer and rested after a day’s hard labour. When we excavated the floors downstairs to cast a more stable concrete slab, we unearthed tens of thousands of shards of broken glass and hundreds of pieces of clay tobacco pipes.

Excavating the floors was the toughest job of the whole conversion in my mind. Because the rest of the still somewhat unsteady building was standing over our heads, it was much too risky to use machinery and so we dug by hand. For three months, night after night after night and illuminated by a harsh electric spotlight, we excavated the whole area down to the depth of more than one yard. It was exhausting work and carried out with no greater sophistication of tools than the original farm labourers would have used when they built the place more than two centuries before. Even on the coldest evenings of winter, the physical effort of digging the thick London clay would have sweat coursing down my face and dripping off the tip of my nose within minutes. It was much like going to some kind of intensive hard labour boot camp gym for hours every night; needless to say, we grew very strong and very fit.

Near the end of our digging and with the finishing line in sight, we made a remarkable discovery. What had seemed at first to be a piece of particularly stubborn buried brickwork turned out to be the remains of an ancient forge. We gradually and carefully unearthed what was left of the structure; some standing remains, complete with ashes, of a forge that long pre-dated the rest of the barn even. It was impossible to remove it from its centuries-old resting place, so when the time came to lay the sub-floor insulation and cast the new slab, we made sure that the forge was completely shielded from the liquid cement. Maybe one day, some time in the distant future, somebody else will come along and reveal it to the light once more.

I was out working in my little garden again today, clearing more rubble and digging through the soil to lower the ground levels and create a couple of raised beds. I didn’t unearth any real treasures, just a few rusty pieces of ironmongery, empty snail shells and hundreds of startled earthworms. One more day of digging perhaps and then I’ll be able to turn my attention to the nicer parts of gardening: making a gate, choosing plants and planting bulbs and seeds and such. Time enough for a treasure to turn up yet though, I guess.



This wonderful photograph of greenfinches was taken by John Mullin - just announced as this year's winner of the RSPB 'Big Garden Bird Watch' photographic competition.