A strange boxful

Another dullish day with occasional hints of rain, but nothing developed. a good day for working outside so I did some more garden and plant fiddling about. I made some new glazing clips out of a soup tin and finally got the last roof panes on the glasshouse!  I was looking for some cutters to cut the tin and went up into the loft in the search for tools. I looked into a box, of which there are Many, and found to my amazement four strange bedfellows. 

First my old ocarina, which I hadn't seen - or played - for years. I have no idea now where I got it! Secondly a huge cone, which I remember as being from Pinus coulteri, the Big Cone Pine from Mexico and California. I can't imagine where its common name came from!! The tree was a young one growing in the Woodland Garden in Bushy Park where I worked in the early 1970s. I think this might have been its first cone. Thirdly a selection of pieces of old clay pipe which I dug up during my time in Holyrood Palace Gardens in Edinburgh and finally, and most excitingly, the top of a human skull which I nicked when some work was being done in the frame yard at Holyrood Palace - a water pipe trench or something. A load of human bones were found and I picked up this piece of bone. 

Not sure if it was a burial pit from the Black Death or what, so this morning I wrote to the authorities at Edinburgh Castle to ask if they knew any more. I had a quick reply - information from the Palace was restricted without permission from the Royal Household! Maybe I should write to the Queen, having bumped into her one evening in the Palace Gardens!

I've put another picture of the skull fragment, plus the pipes, on as extras.