It's amazing what you dig up in other people's gardens....

I'm always digging up mildly interesting things - broken pottery, shards of glass, once even a dead body... long story, don't ask. Well, ok, maybe one day I'll tell you all about it...

The other day, I was merrily weeding around the base of a Mulberry tree, and at the back of it, between the trunk and the wall, there was something sticking up out of the ground.

It looked for all the world like a boot-scraper: you know, the old-fashioned sort with a horizontal bar of metal, usually embedded in a stone, or in concrete, beside the front door.

This caught my eye because, not ten minutes earlier, I had gone into my Client's house to use the loo and Mrs Client had made a passing remark about wondering where the boot scraper had got to. 

I always remove my boots before entering the house: well-meaning Clients often say "Oh, just come on in, don't worry about taking your boots off, we're used to it, stone floors, etc etc" but they have no idea just how muddy I can get when digging their garden... so I always take my boots off.

Except for that one time, last week... but no, I can't bear to admit to it. Sorry, Barbara.  Moving on.

So, I always (nearly always) remove my boots, Mrs Client mentioned a boot scraper, and then I saw what looked like one. You can see the train of thought... perhaps this was the missing boot scraper?

What would it have been doing, way out in the garden? Buried up to its neck? I know, I know, clearly I wasn't really thinking, I was "in the zone" of Zen Weeding - you know, that state where your hands are working on auto-pilot and your mind is busily planning the order of the next few jobs, how to get out that Cistus root without breaking another fork (er hem), wondering anew at the way there are such a wide range of weeds available, but how in any one area of the garden there are rarely more than two or three species...  so I took hold of it and pulled.

And this came out of the ground:

Hmmm... not a boot scraper, then! 

Although, looking at the entire thing, you can see a certain family resemblance to old-fashioned boot scrapers, can't you?

But it's clearly a trap of some kind.

The pair of eye-protector specs on the table should give you some idea of size: far too large to be a mouse-trap, not large enough to be a bear-trap, so what would it be for?

Rats, is the logical next suggestion,  and Mrs Client told me that the previous owners had had chickens in an outhouse in that direction. It is possible, then,  that traps were set to catch the rats running along beside the wall - the advice, for catching rats, is always to work out where their "runs" are, and to place the traps along the run.

"How old do you think it is?" asked Mrs Client.

"I have no idea," I replied, thinking that it looked rather old-fashioned, but not ancient, if you see what I mean. "Maybe 1930s, 20s?"  The style of it looked too elegant to be contemporary: the mud and rust with which was encrusted obviously made it look "old", but still, the design did not look modern.

After work, I did some research online, and at first it seemed as though it might be older than I'd thought, Victorian, possibly: I found quite a lot of pictures of wrought iron traps from that era, but nothing quite the same.

Eventually, I found it: it turned out to be a mole trap, which at least explains why it was buried in the soil.

The amazing part is that they are still being made today, to exactly the same design! Just look at that, then compare it to the picture above.

Snap!

Talking of which, I was shaking and scraping the mud off, while talking to Mrs Client, and I had just said "I think it's rusted solid" when it suddenly pinged undone in my hands!

Luckily it's not a finger-trapping sort of trap: when it went off,  the legs at the bottom closed together, presumably around the body of the offending mole.

But it made both of us jump, I can tell you!

Once we'd recovered from that, Mrs Client told me that they have lived there for nearly 20 years, so it's at least that old - but certainly not Victorian.

The only mystery remaining is that of why it was still there, upright and still "set", despite the fact that the bed in question had been dug over, at least three or four times in the past 20 years!

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