Peter Allan told BBC Scotland, “I was moving a radiator and made a random hole to find pipes and there it was.
While working on a house in Edinburgh, a Scottish plumber found a bottle carrying a paper with a 135-year-old message scribbled on it, according to a November report from BBC Scotland.
After making a hole in the floorboards, Peter Allan, 50, made the amazing find. He told the BBC, “I was relocating a radiator and made a random hole to find pipes and there it was.
He continued, “I can’t quite believe it, I cut exactly around the bottle without knowing it was there. I brought it to the woman downstairs and said, “Look what I have found under your floor.”
What was written on the 135-year-old note?
Allan attempted to open the bottle and read the code after the homeowner waited for her two kids to get home from school. The 19th century paper started to split apart as they tried to pull it out with tweezers, so they had to bust the bottle open.
The mother, Eilidh Stimpson, told BBC Scotland, “I feel absolutely terrible destroying a 135-year-old bottle but it was the only way to reach the note.”
The lost message, which was signed by two of the building crew members and was dated October 6, 1887, was ultimately found by Stimpson.
The message was short and sweet: “Whoever finds this bottle may imagine our dust is blowing along the road. James Ritchie and John Grieve lay this floor, but they did not drink the whisky [sic].
Scottish family fabricates missing note
Later, Stimpson revealed her intent to frame the note with a piece of the bottle, possibly the neck, because it is “such an exciting and delightful item to have.”
She said that her family would replace the broken bottle in the hole it was discovered in with a new message from the family and that she had saved every piece of the broken bottle.