When most think of discovering a message in a bottle, a beach or some type of body of water comes to mind. A plumber was shocked to find a bottle that had been under a floorboard of a home for 135 years.
Peter Allan was working on a house in Edinburgh, Scotland, when he needed to move a radiator by cutting a hole in the floor in order to locate pipework. He ended up locating a whisky bottle that contained a rolled-up message dated October 6, 1887.
“The room is 10ft by 15ft and I have cut exactly around the bottle without knowing it was there. I can’t quite believe it,” he said.
Allan let the owner know and they discovered that it was located that the message was under what would have been the maid’s room when the house was first built. Mum-of-two Eilidh Stimpson managed to wait to read the message until her children got home from school.
When Stimpson tried removing the letter from the bottle with a pair of tweezers, it started to tear. Wanting to preserve the letter, she smashed the bottle with a hammer.
They were able to determine that the message had been written by some men that had been working there in the 19th Century. The note read: “James Ritchie and John Grieve laid this floor, but they did not drink the whisky. October 6th, 1887. Whoever finds this bottle may think our dust is blowing along the road.”
The National Library of Scotland has recommended the note be preserved in an acid-free pocket, which Stimpson has agreed to do. She also plans on putting a new note along with a transcription of the original in a bottle in the same place before the hole is covered.
Stimpson said: “I’ve ordered some pockets and think ultimately we will frame the note with a piece of the bottle such as the neck because it’s such an exciting and lovely thing to have.
“To think it lay there all that time and could have been there forever is just amazing. It’s not from just the 70s or something like that, it’s so much older, it’s very cool.”
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-63678138