A Scottish plumber is making national news after stumbling across a time-capsule that had been concealed beneath the floor of an Edinburgh home for over 135 years.
Peter Allan, 50, and owner of WF Wrightman Plumbing, was working in the home of Eilidh Stimpson when he found the whisky bottle with a rolled-up note inside. He put it down to dumb luck that the hole he cut in the the floorboards was precisely above the bottle’s resting place.
Speaking to BBC Scotland, Peter explained: “The room is 10ft by 15ft and I have cut exactly around the bottle without knowing it was there. I can’t quite believe it,” he said.
“I was moving a radiator and cut a random hole to find pipework and there it was. I don’t know what happened. I took it to the woman downstairs and said ‘Look what I’ve found under your floor’.”
Mrs Stimpson, a GP, decided to wait till her children got home from school before opening the bottle, but getting the message out in tact proved to be a challenge. In the end, they smashed the bottle open and carefully retrieved the fragile slip of paper.
According to BBC Scotland, the note was signed and dated by two tradesmen, reading: “James Ritchie and John Grieve laid this floor, but they did not drink the whisky. October 6th 1887. Who ever finds this bottle may think our dust is blowing along the road.”
Their curiosity unquenched, the Stimpson family dug a little deeper, this time into the census records, and found that the two workers had lived just a few miles away from their Morningside district home, right in the Newington area of Edinburgh.
The National Library of Scotland has advised them that the best way to preserve the note is to keep it in an acid-free pocket, but Mrs Stimpson says she will probably frame it, along with a shard of the bottle.
Before sealing the hole in the floor, she plans on adding a new bottle with a transcription of the previous note for the next lucky tradesperson to find.
