A BOTTLE possibly dating from the 1860s has been found in Windermere by divers. 

Angus Hosking, of Lake District Diving, found the bottle near Langdale Chase.

Darren Fine, a fellow diver who has collected bottles since the early 1980s from Windermere, confirmed that it was an early example of a Hamilton bottle, which allows the divers to date the approximate age of the item. 

Angus said: "We were already looking for older items. We are trying to reduce the amount of broken glass and anything that is dangerous and we started to find older pieces of litter."

Angus found two bottles, one from the 1890s and the other Darren identified from the 1860s. Angus found lots of broken bottles that were from the nineteenth century but he said it was unusual to find a fully intact bottle of that age. 

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Darren said: "The majority of stuff is in the shallows. There are thousands of bottles in the first two or three metres. The majority are from the 1920s onwards."

Darren said that the newer bottles are interesting but collectors are generally looking for examples like the two Angus found. 

He said that Hamilton bottles came after the invention and popularisation of carbonated drinks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because nearly all drinks still came in corked glass bottles, the pressure would burst the cork out. 

Hamilton bottles are designed to lie down so that the cork remains moist and therefore remains expanded to fill the top of the bottle. Darren said that the bottles were a 'pain' for shopkeepers though so they went out of use once other means of storing fizzy drinks were found. 

Because of this, finding this kind of bottle in Windermere gives an indication of how long it has been under the water. 

The reason why so much old glassware can be found near the shore is that visitors to Windermere in the nineteenth century would take an 'out of sight out of mind' approach to litter, Darren said.