BLUEMOMENT

The memsahib's raised bed (garden variety) needs some soil removing. Now next door but one is the church and it would be easy to dump a few bucketloads there. However, graveyard, fresh soil...............people might start to talk and it could attract the wrong sort. Should I go ahead ? I'm asking here because the know-how of Burke and Hare and the other Embro resurrectionists might have been passed down. Am I right in thinking that because of them the custom now in Scotland is to expose the dead on tall stone towers to be consumed by midges ?

Of course the whole point about Burke and Hare is that they only pretended to be resurrectionists, in reality obtaining their supply of fresh bodies by more direct methods...

I seem to recall from The Great Escape that the classic method of disposing of unwanted soil is to trickle it down the insides of one's trouser legs while strolling around whistling nonchanently...

Best method would be to bag it and stack the bags beside your front gate with a notice saying "prime garden soil - £5 a bag" and wait. It'll probably be nicked, in which case problem solved. If you're really lucky you might even make a few quid!

Thanks for correction about these two; had forgotten plot lines of the relevant Hammer film.

spuddy wrote:Am I right in thinking that because of them the custom now in Scotland is to expose the dead on tall stone towers to be consumed by midges ?

Naw, wheelie bins.

Haven't seen the film, but the factual history is interesting enough. A concise account appears in "Scotland's Millenium Canals" by Guthrie Hutton:

"Hare worked on the canal in the Edinburgh area and after it opened was employed as a docker. Burke worked as a navvy near Maddiston and later as a lengthsman (someone who maintains a stretch of canal) in Edinburgh. When Hare moved into lodgings at Tanner's Close, in the city's West Port area, he soon irritated the landlord, another former canal navvy, by paying too much attention to his wife, who had also worked as a navvy disguised as a man. Hare was kicked out, but when the landlord died soon after he moved back in and took over both wife and lodgings.

At the time the anatomy school in Edinburgh needed fresh corpses for its lessons and did deals with "resurrection men", or "body snatchers", who raided graveyards for newly buried bodies. Burke and Hare are usually thought of as grave robbers, but the bodies they supplied never got near a burial. The first was that of an old woman who died at the West Port lodgings. It was a stroke of luck, but the sale of her body inspired the villains to obtain more corpses, and when people failed conveniently to die they were murdered."

Wouldn't the easiest way be to dig a hole and bury it?

Spuddy is a stranger to work - he'd find all that digging quite tedious and anyway he'd need to get the hole the right shape...

Surely you just dig it the same shape as the soil that your burying.

Aye, I'm a semi-retired teacher. Haven't noticed the difference yet.

Haven't noticed the difference
So have you managed to be semi-retired all your working life then?

Nice to hear from a teacher who isn't moaning about how hard they have to work.

Not quite Soil Disposal, but many years ago, madam noticed the soil
level in a flower bed was low. On her way down the lane she saw
a neighbour digging foundations for a garage and asked if she could
have a bucket of soil for the garden. No problem, I'll bring it round.
When she returned from the shops, there was a JCB bucketful of soil
on the drive blocking the garage. The only place the soil could go
was down a flight of stairs. She and her mother spent 3-days
barrowing soil so she could get the car out and take mother home.
I of course was safely on the rig.

Dave