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Semi Detached Cellar
6 Answers
Hi All, I own a small semi detached stone built cottage (built around 1840). It has been puzzling me for a while why next door have a cellar (used as a utility room), but our property doesn't. I cant find any info from neighbors? Is it likely that our property once had a cellar, or will next doors be an add on? Any Ideas?
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Another possibility is that, since this is a small semi, then there's a good chance that the building was one larger property when it was built. Older houses quite often have a cellar under one part of the building only. I've come across that many more times than I have seen houses with a cellar under the whole house. It would be interesting to see what your ground...
18:32 Sat 13th May 2017
Back in the early seventies, when I first got married we lived in a small stone-built cottage in rural Northern Ireland. The cottage was thought to date from the early nineteenth century and we paid the landowner one pound a week in rent.
When we were digging out for a septic tank at the bottom of the long garden, we found a lot of crockery, and half-rotted wooden artefacts, so we dug a bit deeper closer to the house, in the hope of finding more interesting things. What we found was a filled-in cellar containing human bones.
This was at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, when people were being abducted and killed on a daily basis - so the British Army and RUC took over immediately and we had to move out while they investigated. It turned out the bones were from the skeletons of three adolescent children, dating from a couple of decades after the cottage was built - around the time of the Famine in Ireland (1845-52). Local historians thought the bones were probably the remains of famine victims, many of whom never got a proper burial firstly because they were so numerous, and secondly because the families of those that died were themselves too weak from malnutrition and disease and too poverty-stricken to be able to afford a proper burial. So the dead children were buried in the cellar. We lived in that cottage for four years, and we loved it - cold, damp, no running water, and a chemical toilet, but a magic place, set in wooded countryside and rolling hills. A haven of peace in the early days of our marriage, when all around was murder and mayhem. The cottage is gone now, but I still visit the place, and remember those dead children, and the suffering they must have endured.
When we were digging out for a septic tank at the bottom of the long garden, we found a lot of crockery, and half-rotted wooden artefacts, so we dug a bit deeper closer to the house, in the hope of finding more interesting things. What we found was a filled-in cellar containing human bones.
This was at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, when people were being abducted and killed on a daily basis - so the British Army and RUC took over immediately and we had to move out while they investigated. It turned out the bones were from the skeletons of three adolescent children, dating from a couple of decades after the cottage was built - around the time of the Famine in Ireland (1845-52). Local historians thought the bones were probably the remains of famine victims, many of whom never got a proper burial firstly because they were so numerous, and secondly because the families of those that died were themselves too weak from malnutrition and disease and too poverty-stricken to be able to afford a proper burial. So the dead children were buried in the cellar. We lived in that cottage for four years, and we loved it - cold, damp, no running water, and a chemical toilet, but a magic place, set in wooded countryside and rolling hills. A haven of peace in the early days of our marriage, when all around was murder and mayhem. The cottage is gone now, but I still visit the place, and remember those dead children, and the suffering they must have endured.
Another possibility is that, since this is a small semi, then there's a good chance that the building was one larger property when it was built.
Older houses quite often have a cellar under one part of the building only. I've come across that many more times than I have seen houses with a cellar under the whole house.
It would be interesting to see what your ground floor construction is. That might give a clue as to whether a cellar has been filled in.
Older houses quite often have a cellar under one part of the building only. I've come across that many more times than I have seen houses with a cellar under the whole house.
It would be interesting to see what your ground floor construction is. That might give a clue as to whether a cellar has been filled in.
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