And now for something completely different

I’ve always had an interest in hidden treasures, although I never made much time for it. I got a basic but good metal detector for my 19th birthday (I think, that was an eternity ago), but only really used it a few times. I had other priorities.

Recently, I got interested in trying it again. My old metal detector didn’t seem to detect much of anything anymore, so I left it on the curb and bought a new one late last year. Winter came early though, so I didn’t have a chance to really use it until this year.

At my new place my landlords/friends live on the ground floor. They were doing some gardening and yard work, which seemed like a good excuse to bring out the metal detector. We mostly dug up old rusty nails, but there was one reading coming from fairly deep which got me digging further. It was just a piece of old sheet metal, but I was also digging up pottery sherds and old glass. So I convinced them to let me dig a hole, peddling tales of finding a cache of gold coins to get them excited.

(We all knew this was mostly a joke though – the odds of finding gold in this part of the Plateau were probably worse than the odds of winning the lottery. Most of the people who lived in this part of town originally moved there to work in or around the nearby limestone quarry).

The metal detector quickly became useless, because most of the interesting finds were not metal. In the first picture you can see a bit of a glass bottle poking out, in the second was the biggest pottery sherd I managed to save.

These were all my finds after maybe 4-5 hours digging. I ended up spending probably like 18-20 hours in that hole overall.

And here’s a display of some of my finds after all that digging. There was a lot more of the relatively common items (ie: nails and random rusty iron/steel, plain white porcelain, bones and relatively clear glass), but it wouldn’t have been photogenic. Below are some of my favourite finds, including unusual coloured glass, sherds of transferware and stoneware jugs, and a whole bunch of clay pipe fragments. I’m able to date one of the clay pipe as being made between 1805 and 1891 (most likely close to the latter), because it had the markings of William White of Glasgow, whose factory operated in that time-frame.

I also enjoyed finding the buttons, a single brass ring, and a clay marble (I found another, in red clay, after taking this photo). However, the top finds in my mind were the segments of a broken bisque doll, and an odd piece that seems to be dated 1902. There is a horseshoe motif and some faint writing underneath, which I’ll try to decipher with wax paper at some point. I think it is bisque as well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the rest.

At first I was actually hoping this was the location of an old outhouse, as sometimes those can produce fun finds. But in the end, I’m not sure this was even dump digging. Instead, I’m pretty sure this was just a spot where they dumped some landfill a long time ago, maybe to even out the yard or something. With privy digging or dump digging, you’d expect to find more of each item in the same place, but this stuff almost seemed like it was tossed in a blender before being dumped. I’d find one piece over here, one over there, and never anything that seemed complete.

It also made digging pretty difficult. That’s the main reason I think I’m done with this particular hole. The quantity of finds has dried up, but also some of the layers in there are basically like rock. My hands in particular felt pretty worn out … it was good exercise though! I got about 3 feet deep in places.

However, it was a pretty fun experience, and I think I got an interesting hands-on look at what garbage looked like in the early 1900s. Maybe I’ll expand on the experience in my book. Regardless, I look forward to digging more holes in the future in the hopes of finding a different kind of trash than I’m used to.

As for regular trash, the July 1 moving day was pretty mediocre but at least I got some exercise biking and walking around. The trash otherwise hasn’t been super bountiful lately, but I’m still finding some things. Sometimes the summer is a little slower because people are going on vacation, visiting friends and family and whatnot.