Cellar dicovery

Damo

Damo

Member
The wife, sprogz and I have recently been doing some renovation work on a house we are moving to in the new year.

Last week we were told that there would have been a cellar in the property. It didn't take long to find where the entrance to this cellar would have been. So I've removed a small section of the slab covering the entrance and it seems it's been back filled with soil!

Any ideas why someone would do this? The caver in me is telling me to dig  ;)

Damo.
 
Bottlebank

Bottlebank

New member
Normal procedure would be to backfill with soil after burying the bodies, before covering the hole with a slab.

I'd advise against digging, some people are very squeamish about these things, and the discovery of half a dozen corpses is likely to have a severe impact on your house price, and possibly your new neighbours house prices as well, which won't make you very popular?
 
Ship-badger

Ship-badger

Member
Is it a cellar, or maybe a rainwater cistern? Many older houses had rainwater cisterns underneath them, and without regular maintenance these will eventually silt up completely.
Dig, you know it makes sense.
 
Roger W

Roger W

Well-known member
Maybe the cellar was filled in because a previous occupier noticed that the cellar walls were looking dodgy and bulging inwards....

In which case, removal of the supporting infill could result in your downstairs becoming the new cellar and your bedrooms relocating to ground floor level.      :(

The discovery of corpses, as Bottlebank suggests, would mean the police being called in.  There would be blue tape all over the place and you wouldn't be able to get into or out of your street, let alone your house, for ages.    :(

On the other hand, there may be vast subterranean vaults and tunnels leading for miles and miles....    :)

Where will you put all the spoil when you get digging?
 
Bottlebank

Bottlebank

New member
Roger W raises an interesting point re the spoil, have you noticed any other digs in the locality? It's entirely possibly that your cellar is full of someone else's spoil - in which case I'm sure you'd be justified in asking them to remove it.

After all, if Stalag Luft III had cellars then Dickie Attenborough would have been saved months of suffering from chafing of his man parts whilst disposing of the spoil from Tom, Dick and Harry.
 
TheBitterEnd

TheBitterEnd

Well-known member
So you have lifted up a bit of floor slab and found soil? My guess is look else where for the cellar, celllars are where you find them...
 
P

Peter Burgess

New member
We lifted the floor slabs in The Stump, and found soil, now replaced with insulation. It was tempting to dig down, if only to make our own entrance into Ogof Ffynnon Ddu. Soil under slabs doesn't equate to a filled cellar! There might be a cave, however.
 
A

ALEXW

Member
Top tip

don't hire a skip to put the soil that you remove into, just dig a hole and put it in there.

Norman Stanley Fletcher
 
andys

andys

Well-known member
I had some friends who bought a house with a cellar, but the problem was that it was far too low to be useful. So they decided to dig it down to make it usable. Much time and sweat later - and the not inconsiderable problem of disposal of the spoil - and they had a normal height cellar of which they were immensely proud!

A few months later they came to put some stuff in it and found it flooded to exactly the height of its original floor. And not wanting an indoor swimming pool, they then spent an equal amount of time and sweat back-filling it again.

There may be a moral to this tale!
 
kay

kay

Well-known member
Roger W said:
The discovery of corpses, as Bottlebank suggests, would mean the police being called in.  There would be blue tape all over the place and you wouldn't be able to get into or out of your street, let alone your house, for ages.    :(
Click to expand...

On the other hand, if you could be sufficiently convincing about the possibility of corpses, maybe the police would do the digging for you?

The idea of a deliberately infilled cellar made me think of the deliberate dumping of demolition spoil during redevelopment:
http://www.williamsontunnels.com/
 
Damo

Damo

Member
It would seem from the info I've received that i am look in the right location. It's under the stairs and the old door frame that would have been at the top of the steps still exists.

Body or bodies have crossed my mind  :eek:. But I'm equally concerned that it's hiding some sort of structural damage!

I'm removing the carpet from the hallway tomorrow so I'm hoping there will be floorboards I can pull up.

Something else I came across while looking for information was that it's not unusual for someone to back fill a cellar with the debris from building an extension ( one does exist at the rear of the property ). So could this be a reason?

As for caves, it's on  sandstone so no such luck.

Cheers for the replies, I shall keep you informed on what I actually discover.

Damo.
 
bograt

bograt

Active member
Alterior motives aside, I was once party to filling in a beautiful hand picked cellar (late 1700's) with 'waste' from a designer garden (I needed the money!), these things where not filled in by carting stuff through the house, have a careful look round the outside walls and see if you can find an external access, it might give you an easier way to empty it, if it is built on shallow sandstone, there is a good probability!.
 
The Old Ruminator

The Old Ruminator

Well-known member
Any old bottles then I am your man . We cleared out an old cellar or kiln at the back of a shop once and found a human jaw bone. That was the end of that.
 
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