What was in here? -aha

[fluffytail10]

Well the builders have come and uncovered my massive hole! It really is amazing. It's over 1m in depth and 1.5 mwide.
The question i'd like an answer to is why is it so big? I thought it must have had a range in but its far too deep for that - ud never be able to reach the back. Also, its such a small room only about 3.5 x 4m, what could they have possibly needed such a big fireplace for?

Any ideas on date? some of the bricks are barely 4cm thick and very long, while others just seem like lumps of old building rubble up to 8cm thick. Ive found the house on Fadens 1794 map, could it be earlier?

Sadly no witch bottles or anything exciting.

 

[robgil]

it looks like it might have been re-faced.
or are those bricks inside the piers just two different colours?

 

[Feltwell]

I believe your house was built about the time that Father Christmas started to suffer from middle-aged spread. As a result, fireplaces up and down the land were built wider and deeper to accomodate the portly load.

However, Mother Christmas insisted he go on the cabbage soup diet - which, the following year, was very nearly his downfall as he went down a chimney where the embers were still glowing bright. The resulting explosion was how Rudolph got his red nose. Fortunately, Father Christmas survived relatively unscathed and his diet led him on to cope with the smaller fireplaces of later years.

It's been a long day. Hopefully someone sensible will be along later with a proper answer!

 

[robgil]

I believe your house was built about the time that Father Christmas started to suffer from middle-aged spread. As a result, fireplaces up and down the land were built wider and deeper to accomodate the portly load.

However, Mother Christmas insisted he go on the cabbage soup diet - which, the following year, was very nearly his downfall as he went down a chimney where the embers were still glowing bright. The resulting explosion was how Rudolph got his red nose. Fortunately, Father Christmas survived relatively unscathed and his diet led him on to cope with the smaller fireplaces of later years.

It's been a long day. Hopefully someone sensible will be along later with a proper answer!

come on feltwell , there is no such thing as santa.

No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household, a total trip of 71.604 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding etc. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy per second each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's been vaporized by now!

 

[Feltwell]

Pfah! Non-believers.... :roll:

I've seen his internet tracker! So there Nerrr - it must be true, it's on the internet.....

http://www.noradsanta.org/

Have a read of how it all started, it's rather good. My kids loved it last year.

http://www.noradsanta.org/en/whytrack.html

 

[fluffytail10]

Well the bricks nearest the opening (not sure what piers are!) seem amazingly clean! but im not sure if theyve been replaced.
funny hole at the back seems to hv been filled in tho

thanks
x

 

[robgil]

interesting stuff feltwell , might just be tracking santa my self this year.

fluffytail10 is the vertical line between these two points a straight uninterrupted line of mortar or just a line between two shades of colour on the same brick?

 

[jocelyn plummer]

Love the Border Collie, always interested in what's going on!
The fireplace look interesting too, nice find.

 

[Penners]

Well the builders have come and uncovered my massive hole

Possibly once a bread oven? Or a ham-smoking hole. Or a herb or salt cupboard (I don't really believe that one - it's much too big)?

 

[fluffytail10]

hi robgil - no its just a line on the bricks, i think probably where the new (well old and removed) fireplace went up to.

Mmmm a bread oven or ham smoking hole? that sounds fun! i remember seeing some tv prog where they removed a bread oven - it did indeed leave a huge hole. Ive been trying to reserach the history of the house but not much luck so far. I know it 1839 it was a labourers cottage, maybe they did bread and hams on the side!

thanks
xx

 

[fluffytail10]

and what a cute doggie - im glad to see it does its best to 'help' around the house - just like my Meg. tho im getting suspicious as she has aquired the habit of leaving balls on each tread of the winder stairs at night.

 

[robgil]

is that a hole in the back recessed into the brick?

 

[fluffytail10]

no , yet again it seems to be just an area of very clean brick, In fact that area seems to be bulging slightly. Below it, the bricks are indeed recessed, there seems to be a little recessed area about 40cm square built into the back just above ground level. They are also some big iron hooks just up, out of sight, there were three but only 1 whole 1 left now. Would they have been to help small boys clamber up?

 

[middi]

It is quite possible the chimney was much larger ( inglenook style ?) in the beginning hence hooks and things for suasages and bacon. Over the decades chimneys were adapted and gradually narrowed down to ,sometimes, just an opening to fit a small electric fire.

My record,I've found so far, is five chimney within an inglenook 8 feet wide by 5 feet high .

That hole could have been anything from a back boiler to an original baking facility section. ( I could have said Pizza , but I didnt want to incurr the wrath of the Penners on the site :wink:

 

[FamilyWiggs]

middi - I love the way you give pizza a capital P! It is that important that it could have no other!

Fluffy - middi makes a very good point about the chimney possibly having been narrowed over time. Does it look like it might have been when you peer inside? I'd be tempted to take back the plaster on the left and see if anything else appears...

 

[robgil]

i would get the old tape measure out and see if there arse any abnormalities around the chimney by way of hidden voids etc.

 

[Jon Maine]

The flue position and throat should help towards forming an opinion

 

[Ushy M]

arse any abnormalities around the chimney by way of hidden voids etc.

Well, presumably the sun doesn't shine there..... :lol:

 

[robgil]

ooops , just to clarify , thats a typing error and not me thinking this is a thread about hemorrhoids. :shock:

 

[fluffytail10]

mmm il try again. just tried to submit post and it disappeared into the ether.

I think ur right about it being bigger, the left hand wall seems very shoddily built (and not attached to the back wall), and the chimney above it does slope off to the left. However, as for removing the plaster to see - not gonna happen. My better half (who wanted to buy a new build) begged me on bended knee not to remove any more plaster. He even fobade me from removing hideous carpet off winder stairs so we cld shut the door at the bottom - no sense of adventure i fear!

There is a 'void' of some kind on the left, as there is another 60cm of blank wall. i wld hv thort there'd at least hv been a cupboard in there or something.

I shone my torch up the chimney and can see lots of little ledges, a few cm deep, every metre or so. I reckon they will prove to be stuffed with gold coins, hidden jewellry etc, while boyf thinks it will be pigeon droppings and rat bones. We'll hv to get the chimney sweep in to find out.....i'll let u know.

thanks for advice