shewhomust: (dandelion)
[personal profile] shewhomust
The mystery of the message in a bottle, found in the Galilee Chapel of Durham Cathedral, has been solved. Naturally, the solution is less interesting than the mystery: as [livejournal.com profile] desperance says, the coffee never tastes as good as it smells (this remark does not apply in my house, but the analogy is neat).

A bottle containing a document on which can be read the words 'Globe Theatre' found beneath the flagstones near the tomb of the Venerable Bede: that sets the imagination working. The solution of the mystery, by the ingenious manoeuvre of opening the bottle and reading the message - very carefully - is more prosaic. Three stonemasons, working in the chapel in 1913, left a note on a handy piece of scrap paper, saying that they had (presumably inadvertently) opened a grave.

Then again, that handy piece of paper has its own charm: a picture in the paper (but not the online) edition of the Durham Times shows the top half of a handbill advertising a May Day matinée, English Dance Cycle and English Folk Songs presented by Miss Mary Neal, [Mr] Clive Carey and Miss Nellie Chaplin. Text near the torn edge of the sheet seems to promise "Primitive Peasant Dances ... Elizabethan Days."

Not a total anticlimax, then.
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