A couple weeks ago, a Pennsylvania construction crew was startled to dig up a century old mass grave site. This week, a Scottish construction crew uncovered something much less disturbing: a time capsule from the 1800s.
Crews from the construction firm Morgan Sindall were working on the Ruthvern Bridge in Kingussie, Scotland when they dug up a rusty metal box, the size of a typical shoe box. Inside that box was a newspaper clipping from September 1894, a paper scroll, and a bottle of what experts believe to be a bottle of whiskey.
Robert Ogg of Morgan Sindall told BBC, “"It is fascinating to think these items have been sitting in the bridge's structure for 121 years…the changes which have occurred since it was placed there are extraordinary. If you think that the bridge was being used by horses back then, it gives you a sense of the time which has passed."
The ancient artifacts have since been given to the nearby Highland Fold Museum for documentation and display. According to the Telegraph, the old bottle of whiskey could actually be worth a bit of money, citing the sale of a 140 year old bottle of beer that was uncovered during an Artic Expedition and sold at auction for roughly $925 US Dollars.
It’s a good lesson to learn to actually look at the earth you dig up at your projects, you may just be digging up some valuable and interesting history.
Video below, from BBC, shows images of the items contained in the time capsule:
