Abandoned Shit Weekly Contest - №.15 - 'Freestyle!' #aswcontest

Okay... this is going to be a fun one and I'll have to give you some background information to go with this one to truly understand it. We recently went away and we took our metal detectors with us. We were in "gold" country so you just never know your luck right! We've not found that luck yet... however we have found some other cool things over the years.

Anyway... we had done some research on the area, checked a few maps and decided to check a different area from where we had searched a couple of times previously. I had just started scanning over the area when I quickly hit a "big hit", meaning a large piece of metal. We usually wouldn't both with big things as they could be big metal underground pipes etc. But... we decided to take a look.

As my husband was digging we started finding pieces of broken glass, porcelain etc. As we continued to dig the pieces became more and more interesting and we started being a lot more careful. Next thing we pull out a little brown poison bottle from the late 1800's to early 1900's with the words on the side "NOT TO BE TAKEN" and it was all in tack. We don't usually find glass, only metal so this was pretty exciting!!

Pictured below is some of the other items we found... the first jar in the top left hand corner we have found to be a 'Peck's Fish Paste' bottle. We pulled 5 of these from the ground in all various conditions.

The 4 white pieces below the Peck's jar was from a porcelain egg of some sort. I was hoping to find all the pieces but didn't sadly (we will go back at some point and try and see if we can find the rest of it). Many of the pieces I have match up, they're currently soaking atm but once they're cleaned and dried I'm going to try and piece it back together! The only match I have been able to find on what this could possibly be was from a decorative egg holder with 6 eggs. This may be one of those eggs??

You can see the poison bottle there again... and some other marked bits and pieces that we later found extra pieces to. They too are soaking and we look forward to seeing them cleaned up to try and find out what they were.

So we finally found the metal... it was a lot deeper than we would usually need to dig. It was interesting... it was like an old metal box (we think). The top was flat and it had round raised stud like marks around the edges. I was wondering if it was an old traveling trunk, a coffin of some sort entered my husbands mind at one point as he thought it had an odd shape - if it was I was thinking pet as it wasn't deep enough... so then we were a little freaked out. But we also found the poison bottle... which then had my husband very on edge about it!

We ended up prying one edge up to have a look... not very far but enough to see a little. My son found another bottle but when he moved it we realised it was still full of liquid. That was it... my husband was freaked out and decided to cover it back over. It wasn't just one sheet of metal, there were a few sheets with a rio type reinforcement in between. His line of thought was someone went to a lot of trouble to bury this...

My husband kept thinking about the metal box all night long... curiosity was getting the better of him and he decided to go back the next day. He dug down in a different area though, revealing a different corner to the box. Once again they got into it, my son was keen and he wasn't leaving without knowing what was down there....

Once it was opened up, there was a number of items... quite a bit of broken ceramic plates, more broken glass and bottles and another in tact bottle - this one was empty though! It had some markings and we were trying to see what they said while we were out there but we were avoiding touching anything so it was difficult.

This bottle is also soaking atm also but we have found out it is a Dewars Whiskey bottle... we haven't been able to date it yet but hope to once it is clean and we can get more information off the bottle.

My son also collects antique pottery and glass jars/bottles so this was a huge thrill for him to be able to discover his own bottles from the earth. This area was last inhabited in the 1930's so it's quite a thrill to find our own pieces of history like this. As you can tell from my daughter's face in the top photo, she too was absolutely thrilled by our first in tact find!

We're still wondering about it though... what is it, what was it, why was it put there? So many questions but not many answers...