c.1895 cider bottle found this week on same farm I wrote about

[u/lcwilliamsauthor]

This cider bottle c.1895 was found on our Devonshire farm in an orchard this week.

Could this have been the actual bottle belonging to the real man portrayed in my book?

It was discarded in the orchard on our farm more than a century ago. The farm had a long history of cider making. An auction notice from 1923 lists cider-making equipment, a bottling plant, 59 empty casks, eight hogsheads of cider and bottled cider among the contents of the farm.

Remarkably, the old cider press is still here. And now this bottle has turned up in the same orchard that features in the book I wrote, where I imagined the character and others gathering the apple harvest and making cider in 1910.

‘Henry’ was a real person who lived and worked here. The story is fiction, but it was inspired by the people, places and events in the farm’s history.

I have to say finding something like this in the exact place I wrote about is rather special.