Free Republic

We’d never think of inviting a total stranger into our homes. Someone well outside our social circle with an unknown background. Someone who could case the joint, clock the exact security set-up and return with his friends to highlight and delete our possessions. Or worse: someone who’s emotionally unstable, and aggressive with it. And yet we hire workmen we’ve never seen before and give them the run of the joint. Some people leave workmen alone with their most precious possession of all: their family. There is a better way . . . Obviously, anyone with an ounce of common sense...

Workmen painting white lines on a road left a gap for a dead badger because they said it was not their responsibility to move it. The animal had been killed about a week before on the A338 near Downton, on the Hampshire-Wiltshire border. Hampshire County Council said the workers did what they thought "was best" because it is the district council's job to remove carcasses.

Ancient refuge found by workmen The stone-built tunnel leads into the hillside Workmen have unearthed 1,000 years of history on a County Down building site. They have come upon an underground stone-built tunnel in Raholp, where our ancestors might have hidden from the Vikings or from warring neighbours. Archaeologist Ken Neill said that with chambers off from the main tunnel it was a quite complicated souterrain, and probably built by better off farmers. The opening that led to the tunnel - which leads into the hillside - will be sealed and the passage left alone. "It was really somewhere for...