Wandering about just off Gaze Road, Settlement I came across this bottle fragment in the undergrowth. At first glance it just looked like a piece of broken glass of no consequence and easily ignored. But on closer inspection I was excited to see a partial stamp. On the first line were the words THE PROPERT (that I presume would have read THE PROPERTY OF) and on the second line starting with AGY.LTD.EDINBUR (also presumed to be the final three letters of a company name LTD EDINBURGH). The oval base of the bottle indicated that it was not a large bottle. As I found it not too far away from the old hospital site I have to wonder if it was not a medicine bottle of some sort. The fact that there is a Scottish connection and that the stamp font appears vintage, makes me think that it is dated perhaps around the 1930s? I regret that I didn’t have a coin or ruler so that I could have included it in the photo to indicate the scale or size. Despite initial numerous online searches I couldn’t find any clue to the partial inscription.
Update 2021: Four years passed. And, thanks to Teresa Barlow, whose eagle eyes spotted an eBay listing of a bottle, it seems the mystery is solved. The bottle listed on eBay appears to have an identical inscription apart from full stops between the words Agy.Ltd.Edinburgh. The listed bottle is 208 grams and approx 160mm high. The height seems to tally with my memory of the fragment base size that I found. The full inscription is “This Bottle is the Property of Distillers AGY LTD Edinburgh”. AGY is short for Agency.
The bottle fragment I found was part of a whisky hip flask and it would have looked something like the bottle below.
Images of listed eBay bottle used with kind permission micknbon2008.
Further update April 2022: Daniel Smith from New South Wales contacted me. He, Keegan Kepkey-Pilson and apprentice Brayden Kepkey-Pilson dug up a bottle on the central coast whilst working on an old property at Toukley. It was found 2 metres underground and bears the same inscription as above though this bottle appears larger. He kindly sent through these photos and they are shown with his permission.
