The bottle digging thread

Retro6

Retro6

Retro6

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30 Jan 2019
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953
I thought I would start a bottle digging thread which isn't just limited to bottle digging but can include mudlarking as well.

I've been finding a lot of nice things... there are about 5 Victorian/Edwardian tips in my local area of course I can't give details to where they are but they aren't hard to find in general.

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Great pics and looks like a really interesting hobby. I also learned something: "Usage varies by region. UK and Australian spelling is trade mark; the US spelling is trademark." I was sure it was one word.

This is also amazing:

Retro6 said:
of course I can't give details to where they are
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Do you expect GD to turn up en masse at your mudlarping bottle dig all ready to get in on your patch? Glorious.
 
long, long ago when I was a kid a mates dad was into his and I went along a few times, used to get a few of the bottles with the marble in the neck but apparently a lot of the valuable stuff was ink jars and cream pots
 
Rotty said:
long, long ago when I was a kid a mates dad was into his and I went along a few times, used to get a few of the bottles with the marble in the neck but apparently a lot of the valuable stuff was ink jars and cream pots
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They would be Codd bottles the ones with the marbles in the neck. Victorian children used to break them to get the marble out. Often you'd find a lot of codd bottle marbles in old tips. A lot of ink wells they are very common but some are valuable or a rare collector type. Generally Codd bottles aren't worth much but if they have a particular name embossed to on them like a local brewery then some can be quite desirable. The colored Codds are rare and are worth hundreds to thousands. The cream pots are nice, I don't find a whole lot of cream pots in this neck of the woods tho. Ginger beer bottles are my favorite and flagons plus bisque dolls heads and handmade German marbles.
 
Had a huge collection as a child growing up in wales. I’m guessing they just dumped all of this in the garden and occasionally we would find big collections of bottles and pipes. Even found a bracelet and a gold sovereign.
 
Some households had small tips at the ends of there gardens. Back in those days, there was no proper rubbish disposal so people would have a hole in the ground pre-dug and they'd empty there rubbish into and they would cover it up. Many woodlands and green spaces "recreational grounds" were used as old rubbish dumps.

If your house is older 1870 1880 and you see shards of pottery/glass in your garden then you may very well have a small tip.
 
I used to find those weird rectangular bottles in the little stream in front of our house when I was a kid. This was a non-descript stream in a quite sparsely populated village out in the sticks, which wouldn't have even been built in ye olden times. So if they where there, I can only imagine the people in Edwardian times must have spent 95% of their time wondering how to dispose of the mountains of bottles they must have accumulated, and had to resort travelling out to the countryside in horse carts to fly tip them.
 
Retro6 said:
Some households had small tips at the ends of there gardens. Back in those days, there was no proper rubbish disposal so people would have a hole in the ground pre-dug and they'd empty there rubbish into and they would cover it up. Many woodlands and green spaces "recreational grounds" were used as old rubbish dumps.

If your house is older 1870 1880 and you see shards of pottery/glass in your garden then you may very well have a small tip.
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Can confirm.
All our houses on this road are 1865, and we've moved a load of such stuff out of ours. Most bottles were broken, but we did find an early OXO one still intact.
 
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