Presented with this view…what would expect to find when you removed the floor?
To be honest, we thought it would be a red and black tiled floor maybe. Followed by a concrete floor…but the house held another secret!
Underneath this floor they found more than they had expected.
Just below the red and black was part of a slate floor.
The slates were carefully exposed and then removed to safety as a digger was brought in.
A concrete floor needed to be put in place as beneath this slate was just red sand.
Who knows how old this slate floor is. Who knows who cleaned these slates. Who walked on this floor?
If only this house could speak!
We knew that there had been a practice of burying animal bones under the floor of older properties in the area. Historically this was done as a way of ensuring good luck for the house and all who lived in it. We were not disappointed either! Luckily for us we only found three chicken bones under the slates, possibly the remains of meal many years ago. These were removed and reburied after the floor was prepared and before the concrete was poured.
Unfortunately the condition of the slate meant that it couldn’t be kept as part of the floor that would experience heavy traffic. So below you can see that the sand has now been replaced with a concrete floor and the best of the slate has been kept in a section below the stairs, as a reminder of what the floor was before.
