Things you've found when gardening/digging?

[Comps83]

An Irish penny from the 30s in NE England
Some little blue bottles which are poison bottles apparently
A perfectly preserved solid silver Victorian spoon

Heads off to the garden with a spade...!

Oh and someone's long deceased cat . Whoops!

A couple of newts. Living.

My DM once dug up a gold ring set with chips of diamonds and sapphires - but when I say chips, I do mean tiny fragments, so not worth ££££. The ring is so small it just about fits on my little finger. Probably Victorian.

Nothing else except old 19thc bottles, sadly.

Did it have hallmarks ?

A perfectly mummified budgie in a jam jar. I am assuming they didnt want it to be dug up so they put in in a jam jar to conceal the scent.

Set of drill bits in a metal box
Cats eye, the road type not from an actual moggy
School milk bottle, I use it as a little vase
A golf cart, this wasn’t buried, just wanged in, no doubt some drunken party antics from a golf club do,
Many of tonnes of stone
A mans shoe
Loads of blue and white pottery fragments

As a child digging in our garden I thought I’d found a dinosaur fossil and excitedly kept digging until I’d uprooted the entire concrete foundation that my dad had sunk the washing line pole into.

As an adult, loads of old crockery and glassware under the site where an old bothy had been.

I thought I’d found a dinosaur fossil and excitedly kept digging until I’d uprooted the entire concrete foundation that my dad had sunk the washing line pole into.
Similar! Except that I thought it was Roman ruins (we lived on/near a Roman road but nobody was quite sure of the exact route and had never found any evidence).

A perfectly preserved severed dead cats head.

In a plant pot that had had thyme in it, which I'd been picking and using for ages.

Outs self totally to anyone who knows me/has done a training course with an ice breaker thing with me

I was happily repotting my lovingly tended herbs and... dead cats head.

I can still see it. Small, grey, perfectly formed, fur intact. I'm my plant pot.

It was 20 (ekk) years ago and my two flat mates were out. I remember it was a lovely summer day and I had the day off work.

I screamed and ran about ineffectually for a bit then put an empty plant pot over it.

It was a very hot day, I ran inside and hyperventilated for a bit then went back outside. Flies had gathered.

So I did what any sensible person would do, cracked open the wine (it was about 11am), downed 2 large glasses in quick succession, ran out and put the whole lot into 2 massive bin bags, ran through the house and put them in the bin at the front.

The combination of perfect cat head preservation and eating the thyme finished me.

With time and more wine we worked out that what had probably,no it was definitely a strange voodoo ritual by persons unknown to kill us all to death happened was that the previous winter me and my greenfingered housemate had dug over the garden and used some of the soil to pot up herbs/bulbs.

So we unearthed a pagan burial ground/sacrificial offeringand unleashed a curse on our houses until the end of time probably dug up the previous owners much loved pet.

Still, fair ruined my day off.

Hahahaha I think you win!

We once disturbed a mole while digging. Sat with 2 dcats next to us watching the earth moving for 40 mins until it emerged!! Dcats ran away!!

Comps tbh I can’t remember but I’ll ask her!

A really heavy round stone resembling a small cannonball with a chunk out of it. Took it to the local museum and apparently it was formed by a volcanic gas bubble.

A small piece of early medieval roof tile made of terracotta, identified at same museum.

A Victorian enamelled earring in my parents' garden when I was a small child. I hid it in my bedroom as secret treasure. Years later I found it in a box and showed it to my mum - it turned out to be hers! She had inherited her grandmother's earrings and had lost one of them. She was very happy to have it back.

I am cringing at the dead cat stories. My MIL (who is not the most balanced person) buried her dead cat in a fairly small plant pot. It absolutely stank for the entire summer. I really hope when she dies someone will remember which pot it is and not leave new house owners with an unexpected gift!

I've found a whole sheep's skull; many assorted livestock bones; a nice George V coin, lots of Victorian clay pipes and some medieval pottery. I'd love to find something really exciting!

In my granddad's garden I found s Victorian gaming counter made of mother of pearl. Also lots of Victorian pennies. I was in my 20s when I finally twigged, and GD was long gone. He used to put things in the holes we were digging to make it more exciting. Took 20 years to twig 😂.

Well, it worked as it sparked my interest and I studied archaeology. The gaming counter is still my most treasured find.

Lots of little medicine and poison bottles
An ammonite fossil

lots of half bricks, plastic Mother's Pride bread wrappers, nails, screws, an angle joint used to join scaffolding poles, lots of bits of broken china.

I am a keen gardener :)

A wooden bowling ball, several old glass jars. A solid silver thimble!

Nothing exciting. Our house was built in 1998, and the builders must of buried their rubbish as I found a pile of crisp and sweet wrappers

This was a couple of years ago and they hadn't disintegrated

Nothing as exciting as that, mostly clay pipes, shells, an interesting piece of carved marble slab which I'd love to know more about. Strangest is a collection of teeny terracotta plant pots, about an inch high or less.

Lots of pet skulls and bones. Loads of old pottery shards, including half a ceramic doll's tea set - tiny teapot, jug, one cup, two saucers. A (now non-working!) metronome, the sort of thing you'd put on the piano. A car tyre - they're bloody huge when you're digging them out of what will be your veg patch. Probably the bottom rung of someone's potato stack, remember that? Too heavy to carry hunks of concrete seemingly unrelated to any fencing or construction anywhere nearby.

It's only a little garden, so I suppose it's just very densely packed with things.

Roman artefacts. The farm on the field next to us had been sold and they did a dig before starting building work as they knew it had once been the site of a Roman settlement. We therefore decided to do some digging in our own garden and found a few interesting bits of pottery, most of which we donated to the team doing the dig.

Part of a neolithic axe head!
Do I win?
Ds1 was at gardening club at school and found a penny from 1910.

Lots of clay pipes. And loads of bits of old brick and tiles from an outbuilding that used to be where we wanted our vegetable patch. It’s been there for 3 years and I still dig more bits up every year!

Shannith why hadn't the head decomposed?!

I came on here to say a cat skull, that seems very tame now though

I did once find a whole custard cream in a top floor window box though. I eventually worked out a bird must have dropped it. Still pretty weird.