So, James and I went back to Manor Park last week and had a paddle round to see what we could see. He threw rocks, I had a poke around some sherds and and found a number of interesting bits and pieces. Behold, the haul:
Most of it is the usual type of white glazed stuff, the majority of which I left in situ… Mrs Hamnett can only cope with so many of these “valuable historical artefacts”/”bits of old pot” (delete as appropriate) stored in the house! The following are interesting (again, interesting is an objective term!) sherds:
Middle row, centre, is a clay pipe stem. These are quite literally the cigarette butt of the Victorian period, smoked and disposed of with gay abandon. I’m surprised there aren’t more of them in the brook, but then they are quite light and so are easily carried by the water. Date… from the stem alone, impossible to say – 16th to 20th Century! On balance though, almost certainly 19th Century, when tobacco had become an affordable luxury, and clay pipe smoking was normal for even the common man.
On either side of the pipe are pieces of glass. Rounded by being bashed against rocks, they resemble sea glass, and both come from bottles. The piece on the right is thin walled, and probably from a sauce bottle or similar.
Bottom row, from left to right is the rim of a thin and delicate shallow bowl of about 12cm in diameter. Thinking about it, it is probably a saucer, but from that fragment it is difficult to say, as is the date – 19th to 20th Century. Middle is a transfer printed handle from a tall upright vessel – possibly a tureen or similar. Date, as above! And on the right, the badly damaged base to a plate or bowl or similar large open vessel. The brown stripe across the middle is what remains of the ring base, which has come away. Date is almost certainly the same as above.
The best sherd I have saved for last, though. I thought it was an interesting rock when I pulled it out, and was quite excited when I recognised it for what it is.
It would appear to be a sherd from a manganese glazed vessel. “Wow!” I hear you cry collectively…
Well, wow indeed! I suspect that this sherd is 18th Century in date, and could be quite easily be 17th Century, considerably earlier than the majority of the material I’ve found so far.
The blue-ish purple colour of the glaze is very characteristic, and the fabric of the pot is early – a low firing temperature has produced a relatively soft body quite unlike the hard fired later vessels, and it is a coarse earthenware, not a china. It is a thick walled vessel, again quite common in earlier pots, particularly utilitarian vessels such as storage and serving pots, and is markedly different from the mass produced Victorian vessels. I can’t tell the type of vessel from which it comes – it is an open vessel (i.e. not a bottle or similar closed vessel), and has an internal diameter of c.14cm. – so perhaps a jug, or deep bowl?
The move toward finer pottery in the late 18th/early 19th centuries as ‘tableware’ is a response to fashion – the finer the vessel, the more expensive it is – with fine bone china was reserved for the wealthy only. Of course, as a result, everyone wanted some in order to keep up with their ‘betters’, and so the demand for fine pottery trickled down the social ranks, and new ways were found to mass produce finer pottery, though obviously of poorer quality.
That this early pottery is here is not surprising – it dates from a period before Glossop as we know it existed – before the mass explosion of the mills in the early 19th Century, and the subsequent expansion of housing to cope with the need for mill workers. At this time, the main settlement area was Old Glossop, clustered around the church, and with a few mills on the water there. And of course, Shelf Brook flows through Old Glossop. I may take a walk up there sometime this weekend!
The Glossop Cabinet of Curiosities 