Victorian Privy

Today I have been the guest of the Heritage Trust for NW England at Lytham Hall on the Lancashire Coast.here They have been hosting the National Heritage Training Group Annual Conference where traditional conservation skills experts come for a couple of days get together to talk about lime plaster and timber joints etc. They had a group of them demonstrating including wattle and daud, green oak wood working, blacksmithing. Also I went to check up on a project the fund I manage has been supporting, the gardeners privy which has been fully restored but sadly not to working order. It is a double seater. No, it is not so that two can use it at once, the left hand side is for a pee which soaked away into the ground, the right hand side is for a pooh with the 'george the thirds' collected in a bucket. There was a clever mechanism that covered the offending items with sand when a lever was pulled, a sort of dry flush.