If you live in an old house what's the most weird / interesting thing you've found?

[Comps83]

I live in a boring new build which I hate
Hoping to move to a Victorian terrace with period features soon
If you live in an older property what have you found when ripping out 70s plaster board or carpets , in the loft etc.?
I love anything like this

[quote Animum2]@scrowy

Would you ever go into the cellar at all?[/quote]
Nope.

I have no desire whatsoever to knock through a perfectly sound plastered up wall to 'discover' what will most likely be a dark dingy damp hole full of dead frogs that hasn't been opened for over 80 years.

There's a reason someone sealed it up, which was probably that it is a dark dingy damp unusable hole under a very old house.

That's interesting @waterlego particularly as France had been invaded by Germany at that time.

Not my current house but when I was a child we moved from a town 2 hours away to an old house in a tiny little village. When we were knocking a wall through in the new house we found an old map inside of the town we had moved from!

On a high shelf in the airing cupboard, a large silver serving spoon, hammered flat. I've still got it somewhere. Very odd

In one house, a wooden leg in the loft. I can only think the owner of the leg must have had an upgrade and kept it for spares.

In another house an anchor in the loft, very big and very heavy

@Neighneigh we also have cat pawprints in the brickwork of our 1880s house - like you I'd assumed a (in our case) Victorian cat wandering around the brick drying area!

A wash copper!

Found dozens of Billboard posters advertising the latest film - used as carpet underlay in a bedroom.
Discovered owners of the house in 1940's-60's owned the local 'picture house' in the small town and kept all these posters. My late Mum was v excited as she had seen them all in person!

My parents' house was built in the 1880's. Not crazy old, but old enough that when they added an extension the builders knocked through a wall only to find it was the old kitchen chimney, scattering soot everywhere.

There is a bottle dump in the back garden too- I loved excavating it when I was a child!

Not in the same house now, but it was very old. There were various items of clothing in the walls and roof, which were discovered during a necessary and significant restoration (read: adding some form of heating, improving gaps between window panes and plugging holes in walls) by conservation groups. They were studied and 'known about'. What was stranger though, is that despite a number of marks and decorations, there were some that were lightly scratched or carved that could only be identified more clearly when the light wasn't bright or good because of the way that shadows contributed. There was a daisywheel or paw print kind of design that was picked out in soot that it took me a couple of years to 'see'. This looks as if it brings many elements of building protection together: www.apotropaios.co.uk/

@Neighneigh I looked at your photo again. You're right, it's a Napoleonic cat pawprint in brick, not a fossil in stone. My eyesight is crap. Apologies for confusion!