What shall we bury beneath our new building?

Nature Observatory - work begins
Work has started on the new building this week. We've scooped out the earth bank between the Coffee Shop and the boardwalk, and apart from the brick foundations, glass windows and steel door, the whole construction has been grown.  The wood, of course, has been growing for many years, sucking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as it did so, and as it is FSC-certified, we can be assured that it has come from a well-managed forest.  The straw grew on The Crown Estate's Tabley farm in Cheshire last summer, and they have donated it to us for this project, as well as making a generous financial contribution to our fundraising for Conwy Connections, of which this Nature Observatory is a key element.  A huge thank you to The Crown Estate, who from the outset have been as excited as us at the prospect of a green building for the reserve.

How to build a house of straw
This week, the contractors have started on the woodwork, and in a few weeks time, we'll be stuffing the floor and the roofspace with straw, and then building the walls with the bales from Cheshire. The outside will be rendered with lime, and the inside with clay (which arrived from a brickworks in Yorkshire yesterday).  It is a significant milestone for the Conwy Connections project, as it means that all eight elements are now started (indeed, five have also been completed).

Time capsule
When we stuff the straw insulation into the floor, we're going to include a time capsule. We'll register it with the International Time Capsule Society so that at least someone will know its there long after we've gone. We're not setting a date for it to be opened; it will be there as long as the building is standing, so hopefully that will be many decades, if not centuries.  That's where you come in.

We want to know what you would put in our time capsule.  It will be buried in May 2013, so what from this era in North Wales would best indicate what we're about to future generations? We'd obviously like to make it pertinent to the reserve, part of our story, but we're open to your ideas for anything.  Bear in mind that the time capsule is not the Tardis, we don't have limitless room, so it needs to be small enough to fit in a large sandwich box.

E-mail (conwy@rspb.org.uk), Tweet (@rspbconwy) or Facebook us (if you're a Friend) your ideas by the end of Monday 22 April, and we'll let you know in a couple of weeks what we're including.