Oxburgh Hall is a moated country house – a castle, really – in
Oxborough, Norfolk. The Bedingfield family has lived here since its
construction in 1482, but ownership passed to the National Trust in 1952. The
house was undergoing a £6 million (almost $8 million) roof restoration project
when the pandemic hit. An archeologist working on his own during the lockdown
was conducting a search of the rafters when he made a remarkable discovery: two
ancient rat’s nests. The rats themselves were long gone, but they’d apparently
been collecting things for a very, very long time. Preserved in their nests
were textiles and embroidery scraps from the Elizabethan and Georgian eras,
fragments of hand-written music from the Renaissance, and a page from 1568 copy
of “The Kynge’s Psalmes.” If you dug in the walls of my house, you’d find Coke
bottles and fast food wrappers from the late 1990’s. Maybe that’s why I find
stories like this so fascinating.
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