An Unexpected Find

When we embarked upon the process of buying Bardmony, we had expected it to take about 8 weeks end to end. However, thanks to the lock down and delays due to the COVID mortgage holiday backlog, it ended up taking about 5 months – and we spent all of that time cooped up in a teensy tiny static caravan (a trailer house, for the US audience!) while we waited.

After such a long time without access to a gym or much space of our own, and following 5 months of nearly-endless snacking, I was really keen to get back to running. 😬

As there isn’t a super local gym and I was nervous about running on the single track roads around us, we decided to buy an ex-gym treadmill. After some debate about where to put it, we settled on the boiler room behind the kitchen. It was the perfect size and it had a window with a decent view looking over the back paddock – ideal!

When we took the house, the boiler room was empty save for two old glazed wooden cabinets that looked fairly forgotten-about – and upon first inspection, they had contained only a few cans of wasp killer, so we had ignored them until it was time to make room for the arrival of the treadmill.

What a surprise it was to take the drawers out of the cabinets to make it easier to move them, only to find THIS:

An old bottle of holy water!

My first reaction was ‘that’s a bit spooky!’, but I quickly moved to, ‘what on Earth do I do with this?!’. Surely, it’s bad luck to throw out holy water… 😅 So, I posted the question to Instagram, hoping to tap into the hive mind for an answer on what I should do with it.

Amazingly, one of the sisters who sold us the house reached out and said that she knew where it had come from and wanted to share the story with me. After a few messages, we set up a time for a quick call.

As it turns out, the holy water had been procured by her parents during a trip to the Middle East for a Rolls Royce rally in the late 90s. Her father had a serious surgery on the horizon, and though her parents weren’t superstitious, they had been told that the holy water would keep him safe through it. The instructions they were given were simple: apply the holy water to Mr. N-‘s feet at bedtime each night. Suffice it to say, quite a large quantity of holy water returned with the couple when they came home – and this was the last remaining bottle. As Mr. N- lived to the age of 83, perhaps there was something in the unusual bedtime ritual after all!

It was such a sweet story – and it really speaks to the love and affection between Mr. and Mrs. N-. I mean, nightly foot rubs with holy water – that’s devotion! 💙

We offered to send the bottle back to the family as it was a truly precious memory, but the sister thought it better it stayed with the house – so now it lives in a display cabinet in the drawing room alongside the quaich cup from our wedding (it seemed somehow linked).

And, as we’re talking about special finds, let’s not forget the two forgotten wooden cabinets…

We gave them a really good wipe down and they have new lives now – one holds the cookbooks and hats and gloves in the back hallway outside the kitchen, and the other holds random bits and bobs in one of the downstairs cloakrooms:

They aren’t in the best nick, but I really like them – I think it’s nice they are getting used every day again, and we can call the old wear and tear ‘patina’ 😹 Also, as it turns out, we only recently figured out these are part of a 3 piece set – these are the two outer ‘wings’ and there’s a middle unit that wedges into a corner – it’s currently in the garage, having taken us nearly 4 years to realise they were related 🤦‍♀️

So, there you have it – on the list of things I’d never have expected to find in this house, holy water would have been near the top, but what a lovely story!