I quite enjoy watching TV shows about history and enjoyed Time Team where archaeologists dug up various sites, but sometimes history is closer to home. We know people have been living on our plot for a long time as the thatched house here is at least a couple of hundred years old. We think they were mostly simple labourers, so there is unlikely to be any hidden gold or silver. As we have dug over various bits of the garden we find a lot of pieces of glass and pottery. Sometimes there is a whole bottle, but we assume the just chucked out things that got broken. There might not have been regular rubbish collection back then.

Since we have had the chickens I have started finding pieces of [clay pipes](https://pipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_History_Of_Clay_Pipes). The chickens do like to dig up their run and seem to uncover things. Here are some of my finds.

![Finds](https://images.esteem.app/DQmaDkR4uaa16BWKRa7yz7C1K2LTXfqG1529BAMthpjdmCw/image.png)

The pipes must have been fairly fragile, but the bowl in the top left has survived well. People were using these up to 100 years ago, but it could be older. The partial bowl in the bottom left was found in the last week, as was the little head. I assume the latter broke off some figurine.

My wife's family have lived here a long time, so they may have used these pipes.

Before we lived here the garden was mostly used for growing food, but we had a lot of it turfed. There used to be a big chicken shed that we knocked down. That was long before we got our own chickens, but it would have been far too big anyway.

![Chicken shed](https://images.esteem.app/DQmdXFzFmxfGgMWzgepcU5yLAjmEXiGnVJ15KMz8N3V6mfg/image.png)

There was lots of stuff stored in there, but not much of real interest. Nice old bike and some engine, possibly from a lawnmower.

![Contents](https://images.esteem.app/DQme3zAaoRDneyLVq5QwMbnZ7UNRTLhP6MzxdBAQeUJWTkV/image.png)

Knocking it down was a big job. It was in the way and not a very attractive structure anyway. We gave the wooden wheelbarrow to some friends.

![Demolition](https://images.esteem.app/DQme6hDY8nXbGaouCcpnyuVzBxJnrNLmyXarToUBxtMeVE2/image.png)

I was just getting lost in our old photos. I have a few thousand on Google Photos. I like that it reminds me what I was doing in previous years. I will never get all the photos properly organised, but at least they are preserved. I scanned in a load from our pre-digital days.

Live long and prosper.