Pottery… and more.

October 15, 2018October 28, 2018 Tim Campbell-Green3 Comments

Evening all

It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t published any pottery or other bits and pieces for a while. Of course, whilst I may not have written anything, it doesn’t mean that I have stopped picking things up… nope, I have literal bags of the stuff, much to Mrs Hamnett’s annoyance.

So here goes with some interesting bits and pieces from all over Glossop.

These first sherds of pottery are from the back garden of the Prince of Wales pub, Milltown, Glossop. I have already blogged about the clay pipes from here in this post, but this is the pottery that goes with them.

PoW — Treasure from the Prince of Wales pub. I’m happy to return them, if they want them.

The same age, unsurprisingly, Mid to late Victorian, possibly early 20th Century. The stoneware (top right) is fairly bog standard, and probably comes from a ginger beer bottle or similar (which makes sense, given where we are). The blue on white pottery is difficult to date from small fragments, but it starts in the 1790’s, and carries on until… well, now! This wouldn’t be early stuff, and it’s been kicking around for a while in the soil, so Mid – Late Victorian it is. The top left is from a featheredge decorated dinner plate, measuring 24cm in circumference. Here is a good example of the type with some discussion. This style of pottery also starts 1790ish, but the type we see here is the same date as the others. It is commonly found with a ‘shell edge’, but this one has the impressions on the surface, but not the undulations. All very common, and very in keeping with the place being a pub in the busy Milltown area. I want to know what was being served on the plate – good hearty pub food of meat and veg, one assumes.

This next sherd is from Whitfield Recreation Ground. I found it a few years ago, after some heavy rain, just underneath the bench by the swings.

Wrec — Unexpected find from Whitfield Rec.

Cream coloured stone ware, hard fired, and virtually indestructible, as I have mentioned elsewhere. This sherd is glazed inside and out, and comes from the bit that the joins the base to the side. This type of pottery was only normally used for ginger beer or milk in the late 19th and very early 20th Centuries, so we may assume that as the date. It’s a possible rare survival from a time before the recreation Ground was there (it opened in January 1903). I intend to do a future blog post about the ground, as it has a fascinating history.

This next lot is from Old Lane in Simmondley. This was the original road between Charlesworth and Glossop, and joined in the meeting of several roads at St James’s church, Whitfield (I have blogged about that meeting place before). I did a bit of a walk along the path as far as it goes (here, on my Twitter feed – and the next few photographs on from it), and it eventually fizzles out into fields. But along the way I picked up a few sherds.

Simmondly, Old Lane – the original road.

Top right is three sherds of cream ware, without decoration, and eminently undatable – probably Victorian, but ultimately these are destined for the midden in my garden. Top middle is a piece of thick slip glazed earthenware. This, I think, is 18th Century, so relatively early, and certainly earlier than the other sherds. It is glazed on the interior surface only, with the outer surface being washed with a red slip, so I think it is probably a cooking pot of some sort. Top left is a large stoneware storage jar of some form, or possibly a flagon like this. It is salt glazed on the inside, measures 14cm in diameter, has a chamfered edge around the base, and is almost certainly mid to late Victorian. Bottom right is a fine china open vessel – a saucer possibly – it is undecorated, and not enough remains to get a diameter. Bottom left is a broken fragment of a stoneware storage jar. It is salt glazed, and has an impressed decoration of a border of round blobs, which is a very common motif for this type of pottery.

Now, the good stuff!

There is a place, if you know where to look, in Manor Park, that produces all sorts of goodies. I think it is a late Victorian – Edwardian rubbish dump, or at least was one before being redeposited. Over the last few years, I have pulled some very interesting bits and pieces out of the soil, and I suspect there is plenty more, too.

First up, these two.

Unbroken glass bottles – something of a rarity.

The one on the right probably contained a hair oil or something (I don’t known why I know that, or even if it’s true, but I seem to recall reading it somewhere). Not that impressive, other than the fact that it still has the original label on it… except I can’t read the bloody thing! Frustrating.

The blue one on the left is lovely, though. Not a mark on it, and when I cleaned it off, I realised two things – firstly, there was a thick liquid inside it, and secondly, the seal was still good. I cleaned it really well, and gently opened up the bottle, and despite Mrs Hamnett daring me to taste it, I instead smelled it – faintly floral and clean. I think it’s rose scented oil for ladies to wear. A wonderful find.

The next two are really quite nice, too.

bot2 — A taste of childhood – I love the personal side to archaeology.

On the left, a fragment of a child’s cup, presumably with a nursery rhyme round it. I have looked up the phrases “a terrible grin” and “blew them both”, but nothing pops up the internet. If anyone has an idea, please let me know, as I’d love to find out. The fat figure also seems to have a tail – a dog or wolf? I was thinking the Three Pigs as a possibility, with the wolf blowing down the houses, but I don’t remember him blowing two houses down…

On the right, one of my favourite finds. A hollow-cast toy soldier, a child’s prized possession, perhaps. A member of the Grenadier Guards, he has his rifle shouldered, and is marching, albeit with no feet, but at least he has the dignity of having paint. I love toy soldiers, and my own childhood was filled with Airfix plastic ones (I still have them… they await Master Hamnett’s sticky claws!). They were cheaply produced in their thousands, and are not uncommon in rubbish dumps, but I absolutely adore this figure. I have looked online, and although there are thousands like him, I can’t quite place him.

Amazing stuff, and if you buy me a drink, I’ll tell you where to look!

And to end with, a little foreign fun. During my France trip this summer, I found this crumbling out of a soil bank in a vineyard, on the road to the walled city of Carcassonne.

It’s the dimple from the bottom of a wine bottle – technically called a ‘punt’. This one is blown glass, which ages it – you can make out the tiny air bubbles when you hold it up to the light. I’m no expert, but I would say it is certainly 19th Century – and apparently the deeper the punt, the earlier the bottle – so perhaps earlier? Anyway, given where we were, I couldn’t very well leave it there, could I?

Hope you have enjoyed the pottery, and as always comments and questions are most welcome.

Your humble servant,

Some Questions Solved

October 3, 2018October 6, 2018 Tim Campbell-GreenLeave a comment

Greetings all

So, I received a pair of emails recently, and both of them answered an outstanding question that has been bugging me for some time.

Answers people, we actually have answers! I asked, you listened, and by Great Zeus (or Arnomecta, perhaps) you answered.

So, drum roll please…

THE STONE IN ST JAMES’S CHURCHYARD, WHITFIELD.

I mused here on the possibility that a large, out of place, stone in the churchyard St James’s, Whitfield, might be part of the base of the Hollin Cross that almost certainly stood at the junction there, on Hollincross Lane.

Hollincross 1 — Here is the stone in St James’s – not a cross base!

I was wrong. And how!

I got an email from Louise Seville which states:

“My father-in-law Neal Seville had some connection with the church (Sunday school??), I think in the 1970s. He was giving a talk based on the parable of the wise man and the foolish man. He and his friend Bert Taylor from Chunal, brought the stone from Bert’s own small quarry at the back of his house on Chunal. The stone was moved on a truck – Bert had a haulage company. The stone was used in church to illustrate the story and was abandoned in the churchyard afterwards as it proved to be too difficult to move. Neal said that in the future people would wonder how the stone got there and come to all sorts of conclusions! “

And how right he was!

So there we have it folks. I genuinely think that it was bonkers to use a stone that size to illustrate the parable, no matter how factually correct! But apparently that was about right for Neal, who got up to all sorts of capers. Here is the parable, for those of you that slept through Sunday School.

So my thanks to Louise and Eddie Seville for solving the mystery. And, of course, thanks to the late Neal Seville for providing one in the first place.

Now, the next one has bugged me for years, so I am truly grateful for its solution.

THE ODDLY SHAPED CERAMIC OBJECTS

I asked for ideas about these bits of pottery that Sandra T. and I had found. They were so oddly shaped, and so similar in production, that they must have had a single, very specialised, purpose. But what purpose, that was the question.

Pot Mystery 2 — The puzzling pieces of pottery

Well, bam! An email from the wonderful Eddie Picton arrived in my inbox the other day.

May I suggest that they are “creel peg pivots” as used in textile machinery. A roving bobbin had sliver wound on it, this was then put upon a creel peg and then put in following machine creel. The lower end then would be free to rotate on the ceramic with minimal friction. I worked in the last spinning mill in Oldham, the last of this type of creel was scrapped in the early 1990s, the mill finally closing 2002.

The connection between the object and the place – both connected with weaving and spinning – made this very likely, and it is not an interpretation I had thought of before. I did a bit of research, and began to understand how they would have worked. Yes, it seemed to fit.

Last night, Eddie was at the Glossop and Longdendale Archaeological Society talk on ‘Melandra – Past and Future’ given by Mike Brown and Roger Hargreaves (and very good it was too). He gave me this drawing of how the creel peg pivot would have worked and where it sat in the machine.

Our pottery pieces are those marked ‘Pot’ in the picture, with the bobbin/creel peg sitting in the hollow, glazed, part of the mystery object. They are tapered slightly so that they can fit into the holes in the frame.

These are those, in situ, in Styal Mill. The photo is Eddie’s.

So that’s that solved! Thanks for that, Eddie, you’re a star. And it seems I owe you a drink… I’m as good as my word. See you on the first Tuesday of November.

I have another blog almost ready to go, so fingers crossed you’ll get a bumper crop of posts by the weekend.

As always, comments and questions are very welcome.

Archaeology · Oddities

A Puzzling Piece of Pottery

June 29, 2018June 30, 2018 Tim Campbell-Green1 Comment

Evening all. The third blog post of June… see, I am trying.

Anyway, this one should (hopefully) provoke a bit of a response. I say hopefully because, dear and precious readers… I need a favour.

Some back story.

I received an email from the wonderful Sandra T. some months ago, asking whether I knew anything about this piece of pottery that she had found in Manor Park. She, like most of the people who read this blog, pick up random things they find interesting, which is to be commended (although, apparently, she keeps them in a clock… but let’s not judge).

Pot Mystery 1 — The mystery object – AA battery for scale. Copyright Sandra T.

Now, I had no idea what it was, but it rang a bell. a brief search through my ‘interesting things’ box, and lo!

So now we have three of these mystery objects. I found mine in an old dump near Broadbottom, which at the latest was 1910’s, but was generally earlier – say 1890’s – which at least gives us a time period to look at.

Interesting. I thought I’d do this post eventually, as someone out there might know what , when, and why.

Last month my new neighbour (hello Simon A.) partly demolished and rebuilt a wall on our property line, and in the process discovered that the whole wall sits on a bed of pottery and other domestic waste. This mountain of material will be the subject of a future post, especially as it makes a fairly coherent deposit, thus can tell us interesting things. The wall can only have been built post 1850-ish, and definitely before 1860, which gives us a clear date, too. Amongst the bits and pieces was this:

Pot Mystery 3 — Another one… what are they?

So now we have four of them.

They are roughly conical, tapering to the base, measure between 10 and 12mm high, 13-14mm across the top, and roughly 11mm across the bottom. The bottom is flat, the top is hollow in a perfect hemisphere (I say top and bottom, but actually they might work either way up). Some are glazed all over, but one is only glazed on the interior of the hollow. This last point is important, and may hold the key to understanding what they are; it matters that only this bit is glazed, i.e. waterproof, not the rest of the object. Why? Also, they are clearly mass produced, and have a very specific role… but what?

I have two suggestions, both of which may work, but equally they are guesswork!

1) Kiln furniture. When you fire pots in a mass group, as they were being in the Victorian period, you need to keep the plates, etc. separate in the kiln, or the heat won’t circulate properly and you end up with poorly fired plates. These spacers were made in their millions, and were about the same size and shape. Though what they would be doing here in Glossop – not known for it pottery kilns – is anyone’s guess.

2) A way of selling medicine. The little hollow bit is glazed, but the exterior isn’t, so perhaps the medicine was stored in that bit, and scraped out when needed? Or it held a single pill that could be crushed in the hollow?

So over to you. Please, please comment and let me know what you think. The question is very simple. What on earth are they?

I’ll buy a drink for anyone who can tell me, with proof, what they are.

Archaeology

A Garden Gift

May 9, 2018May 9, 2018 Tim Campbell-Green2 Comments

A glorious weekend – I got all my vegetables planted, the garden was tidied, the lawn was mown… and wine was drunk in the sunset. A very succesful weekend indeed.

I was going to blog about some bits and pieces I had found recently, but two wonderful things happened over the last few days. The first of which will have to wait… it will take a bit of unpicking (and cleaning and researching). It is very exciting. And lots of it.

But for now, I present the second wonderful thing, a gift from my raised bed of onions and garlic!

Slate 1 — You can see the marks where it has been shaped, though I don’t know how they were made.

Ok, so I know it doesn’t look like much (so many of my blog posts start like that), but it’s the bottom end of a Victorian (or very early Edwardian) child’s slate pencil. Paper was a very expensive commodity in the Victorian period, and you certainly wouldn’t have given it to children to learn to write on. Instead, they practised their copperplate handwriting on slate writing tablets with slate pencils such as this.

Years ago, I found an old wooden pencil case in a junk store, and in it were two complete and several broken slate pencils – it’s nice to see a complete original one.

Slate 2 — A complete version of a slate pencil – again, you can see the grinding marks where it was shaped.

Last year, I was poking around a Victorian rubbish tip with a friend (as you do…), and I came across this broken example of a writing slate.

Slate 3 — Broken writing slate. You can see the lines used to guide the child learning copperplate script.

The thing is wonderful. You can clearly see the engraved lines – thin, thick, thin, for the upper, middle, and lower part of each letter – to keep the child’s letter forms perfect and copperplate. But look at the edges too – they are shaped – it may be mass produced, but some care has gone into how it looks.

I turned it over, and found this on the reverse

Wonderful – squared paper for maths problems, and probably for art too. I love this object, and it is among my favourite things that I have found. Sadly, it wasn’t in the Glossop area, but in deepest, darkest, Lancashire, but I thought I’d share it anyway to illustrate my pencil… so to speak.

Here’s what it would have looked like when it was being used.

Slate Tab — Victorian writing slate, lifted from this website.

The question is, then, how did the slate pencil fragment end up in my garden?

We archaeologists are obsessed with object biographies:

“Not only do objects change through their existence, but they often have the capability of accumulating histories, so that the present significance of an object derives from the persons and events to which it is connected.”

(Gosden C. and Y. Marshall. 1999. ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects’ p.170)

And this object has a fascinating biography. It starts with a pencil being dropped by a child and broken. It is then thrown away into the toilet with all the other rubbish, and taken away by the night soil man. Via the process of night soiling, it ended up spread onto a field. But not my field, yet. This is the interesting bit – the raised bed in which I found it was filled with soil that we bought from Lymefield Garden Centre in Broadbottom (highly recommended, by the way). The source for this soil is, I think, just behind the garden centre, but the original location for the pencil (i.e. the school) was probably Manchester, or perhaps Ashton Under Lyne (although, I suppose there is no reason to assume that it couldn’t have come from a school in Broadbottom).

The fact that the pencil may have started out being used in Manchester, and ended up in my onion patch in Glossop, via in a field in Broadbottom, is a cautionary tale for archaeological intepretation – we could have simply assumed that my house was once used as a school.

Anyway, slate pencils are not uncommon finds in fields and gardens – night soiling means they get around, and they stick around as, like pottery, they are virtually indestructible – Here, for example, is one on a blog run by a gardener who records the things she finds in the soil. And a brief glance around the internet produces a number of similar results. Still, it’s a nice little find, and a wonderful piece of social history.

As ever, comments and questions are most welcome.

More very soon.

Archaeology · Wells

Some Lost Mottram Wells

February 15, 2018February 18, 2018 Tim Campbell-Green4 Comments

I thought I’d venture a little farther afield this week. The blog is intended to explore Glossop’s heritage, but I feel that if I can see it from Glossop, I should be allowed to blog about it… even if it is in another county.

But don’t worry, we won’t be going to Yorkshire!

St Michael and All Angels church in Mottram dominates this end of Longdendale – it is visible from all sorts of angles, disappearing as you travel various roads and paths, only to pop up unexpectedly from behind buildings or between trees. Indeed, it’s presence keeps watch over the valley, almost as a reminder that the church watches over the people. In fact, I can see it from James’ window, on the distant brow.

Mottram Wells - Church — St Michael and All Angels, Mottram. Photograph by Stephen Burton.

It sits on a prominence called War Hill (from the Middle English Quarrelle, meaning quarry), and is a particularly bleak place, catching all the wind that roars down Longdendale from the moors. The church itself, though severely ‘improved’ during the Victorian period (read, monkeyed around with and partly rebuilt) is still at its heart essentially late medieval in date – mid 15th Century or so. Going further back, it may well have been the site of Saxon church prior to that. Travelling even further, there is evidence in the form of cropmarks that it might have been the site of a Roman signal station connected to Melandra – a perfect place with commanding views up and down Longdendale. Prior even to that, particularly given its prominent location in the landscape, it must surely have been attractive in prehistory, though there is no evidence at present.

As an interesting aside, during the late 17th Century a whole pile of my ancestors, the Williamsons, were ‘hatched, matched, and dispatched’ here (that is, they were baptised, married and buried). The Williamson family married into the Sidebottom family who were fairly big in this area, were important in the early Industrial period, and were consequently quite wealthy. Alas, my line gradually becomes poorer, and we end up in East Manchester working in a mill, rather than owning it.

Mottram Wells - Williamson — Signature of John Williamson, my great, great. great, great, great, great, great grandfather, born in 1678 in Mottram, and who married Elizabeth Sidebottom on 15th February 1703 in Mottram Church… exactly 315 years to the day, today, coincidentally, and rather spookily. I will raise a glass to them whilst looking at the church as soon as I have published this post!

Perusing the old OS maps of the area, as I am wont to do (here), I noticed three wells in the immediate vicinity. Now, nothing unusual there, the whole area is teeming with them as we live in an area with a high number of springs. However, what was unusual is that all three, very close together, were named. Normally, a well is simply marked ‘well‘ on an OS map, but the fact that these have names could indicate that there may be more to them. And what names they are – Daniel Well, Grave Well, and Boulder Well – names that conjured up wonderful images. Well, well, well, I thought, this must be worth an investigation.

Mottram Wells - Map — The three wells, Daniel, Grave, and Boulder, are outlined in Red. Mottram church is outlined in green in order to get your bearings. This is from the 1886 1:2500 OS map. Note also the Coal Shaft and Mottram Colliery marked – the area has a very low quality coal seam running through it that was sporadically mined in the 18th and 19th centuries.

And so it was.

Daniel Well is situated on the left, northern, side of a track that comes from War Hill along the side of the school, and downhill to a pond. Interestingly, the only artefactual evidence from this exploration came from this first part of the track, just behind the school playground.

Mottram Wells - Bottle — 1/3 pint of Co-Op school milk in a squat bottle. This really is a nostalgic trip!

I am just about old enough to remember free school milk, and these are the bottles they came in… It has been over 30 years since I touched one of these last, and the feeling was one of immediate nostalgia and a weird sense of happiness. Silver foil top and a blue plastic straw… I was back in Bradshaw Hall Infants School, just like it was yesterday! What I love about this artefact is that the only way it could have ended up on the track behind the playground is if some naughty child threw it over the fence… if you put it to your ear, I swear I can hear the “vip, vip, vip” sound of Parka coats rubbing together and the cries of “go on, I dare you… chuck it!”.

On to Daniel Well, then. The sunken path is muddy, but well constructed and was clearly used – I wondered if this was the main well for the area. My first sight of it seems to confirm that thought.

Mottram Wells - Daniel Well 1 — Daniel Well, overgrown and unloved. Beyond is the playing field of Mottram School, and beyond that, Longdendale.

The path widens out at this point, and the stone built well head structure stands well built still. The path is very boggy, and although the well is overgrown and possibly relatively dry in terms of water within it, the spring that created the well is still flowing freely downhill.

Mottram Wells - Daniel Well 2 — Close up of Daniel Well. Stone built arch, and side platforms upon which to put your buckets, bottles, etc.

The stone-built arch that is the front of the well goes back some three feet, although it is sadly now full of collapsed rubble. To me, this seems a sad end to what was one of the most vital aspects of the village – lives were, quite literally, saved with this water. Food, drink, laundry, baths, all came from this point. People who met drawing water here married in the church above, and had children. Gossip and community, focused on this place, and yet, no longer. I would love to see it restored, or just a little better cared for.

Following the path down, the water flows into this secluded and sheltered pond.

Mottram Wells - Pond — The pond from the end of the track. The water flowing into it from behind the camera comes from Daniel Well. It then flow out again through a channel to the left.

Clearly Daniel Well was an important well in the area – the path and the stone built well head attest to this. I have no idea about the name, though – possibly from a personal name of the person who owned the land? Something Biblical, maybe? Any thoughts, anyone? The 1954 1:10,00 sees the last mention of Daniel Well on an OS map, and clearly by that point it had ceased to be important as a water source. Sadly, I doubt anyone living nearby would know it was there now, or at least know that it had a name.

Making my way back up, I decided to look for the other two wells. I had studied Google maps before exploring, and took a while to work out the locations by superimposing the old map field boundaries onto the modern satellite image of the area.

Mottram Wells - Overlay2 — 4 is Daniel Well, 3 is Grave Well, and 2 is Boulder Well. 1 becomes important in the discussion below. The black lines are the field boundaries shown in the 1886 map that are no longer there to help with orientation.

Alas, there is nothing left of Grave Well except a muddy patch in the field.

Mottram Well - Grave Well Site — The muddy area in the middle ground, in the slight dip, corresponds to the location of Grave Well. The ground was boggy and is clearly a spring of some sort. The view is looking south.

I am not sure what would have stood here originally – perhaps a structure like that at Daniel Well, but I feel this is unlikely: it is in the middle of the field, and with only a minor footpath to get to the well. No, I think it more likely that it was a simple affair that held some water where it bubbled from the spring underneath. I love the name, though – obviously derived from its proximity to the burial ground of the church, out of view to the right in the photograph. Either that, or it may recall the discovery of a burial in the immediate area. Either way, it does raise interesting questions about water tables and burials, though, and I’m not sure I would like to drink from Grave Well! Its last mention before it disappears into the veil of history is on the 1882 1:10,000 OS map. It clearly lost its importance, and was gradually forgotten about.

Pushing further on I looked for the Boulder Well and, when I found it, was similarly a little disappointed… at least at first, anyway. It was another muddy patch.

Mottram Wells - Boulder Well — The muddy patch in the left foreground corresponds to the location of Boulder Well on the map. The view from here, looking east, is incredible – Longdendale Valley at the left, Glossopdale at the right, and the hump of Mouselow just right of centre. Melandra is somewhere dead centre of the photograph. Despite it being dark, I am quite proud of this photograph.

As with Grave Well, I am not sure what would have stood here originally – probably nothing much. Also, in common with Grave Well, the last mention of it on the OS map is the 1882 1:10,000 map, after which it disappears, and is gone forever. The name intrigued me, though: Boulder Well is a very specific name, deriving from… well, one assumes… a boulder. The lack of boulder is, then, confusing, and a little disappointing.

I pushed on regardless, to see what I could see. And lo! In the next field north, at the edge, there stood a bloody big boulder!

Mottram Wells - Boulder Well2 — The boulder! Looking north. It is marked as point ‘1’ on the satellite map above.

Mottram Wells - Boulder Well3 — Close up of the boulder. It is a glacial erratic of some sort, rounded and left behind by the retreating ice.

Now, although it is in a different field, this must be the origin of the name Boulder Well. Indeed, it appears to have been moved ‘recently’ – it is sitting on top of the grass, rather than embedded in it. However, if it had been moved, this at least would explain why it is in a different field from the ‘well’, and why it now stands comfortably out of the way at the field boundary. I wonder when it was moved, and where it stood originally.

Mottram Wells - Boulder Well4 — The boulder, with the Longdendale Valley behind it.

The fate of these wells is interesting, and is obviously tied to the introduction of clean piped drinking water directly into your home. We – and I am very guilty of this – have a tendency to romanticise the past, and a wish to remove the trappings of modern day living, to peel back all the ‘progress’ we have made, and to revert to a simpler way of life. I love the idea of having to walk to a well to draw pure cold water, it would be so… earthy, grounding, basic. Free and simple.
But then I have never done it in the rain, sleet, or snow, wearing ill fitting wooden clogs, wrapped in a basic cloth shirt, slipping down a muddy unmetalled path, after having worked 15 hours in a mill.
I may yearn for a less commercial, more simple life… but I don’t yearn for pneumonia.

Hope you enjoyed the jaunt around Mottram. I have a few more posts I’d like to do about various wells – they intrigue me – so watch this space.

As always, comments of any kind are most welcome.

Archaeology

Even More Shelf Brook Sherds

November 22, 2017 Tim Campbell-Green3 Comments

With an obvious predictability, I cannot resist having a poke around the brook whenever I’m in the neighbourhood – there is always something to find. Ok, so it’s not quite mudlarking on the Thames foreshore, but it is Glossop’s equivalent, and that makes it all the more important to us (if not quite as bountiful!). By the way, if anyone is interested in mudlarking, or the slightly haphazard and magpie approach to the past that this blog is following, then check out the book London in Fragments by Ted Sandling. I cannot recommend it enough – beautifully illustrated with fragments of pot, glass, pipe, stone, metal, etc. and each with a very interesting essay accompanying the item (be warned, the ‘Look Inside’ feature on Amazon misses out all of the photographs!). Just beautiful.

So then, the haul!

Pot 1 — At first glance, not that inspiring… but bear with me!

As is becoming my habit, unless they were decorated, or a rim, a base, or a handle, I left the white glazed earthernware and china in the brook. As a rule of thumb, these are the four criteria archaeologists use to sort out the ‘feature sherds’, which are diagnostic (giving us information about date, type, function, etc.) from the ‘body sherds’, which normally make up the majority of a assemblage. It is a rule of thumb, though, and some body sherds can be equally important if they are of an unusual fabric, or are able tell us more information.

So what can we see?

Pottery first. Top sherd is a from a small-ish and closed salt-glazed stoneware vessel. We can tell it is from a closed vessel (i.e. like a bottle, not open like a bowl), by the fact that the interior surface is rougher and unfinished – why waste your time glazing it properly if no one is going to see it? Also, the salt glazing process involves literally throwing salt into the high temperature kiln where it vapourises forming the characteristic glaze; this vapour will not readily reach the interior of the vessel. This vessel was probably something like an ink pot or similar, but by the late 19th century, the date of this sherd, salt-glazed stoneware was mass produced on a literal industrial scale, so it is difficult to be certain.

Middle right. Another closed salt-glazed stoneware vessel, same date, but larger – possibly a milk or lemonade bottle bottle or similar. This sherd is thickening slightly at the left, and so is perhaps forming the shoulder of the bottle.

Middle left, is another salt-glazed stoneware vessel. This one appears to be open, and is decorated by using the rouletting method – a small wheel with teeth was run over the surface to produce the characteristic incised decoration. This one has a very common motif of undulating lines around the body of the pot. The sherd is mid to late 19th century, and probably from a storage jar or crock, and despite being relatively thin, is probably from a large vessel.

Bottom left is the base to a milk or lemonade bottle (it is flat, but lifting slightly toward the middle of the base, and you can see the concentric lines that characterise the base of these bottles). Stoneware again, but a more conventional glaze which gives it the characteristic cream colour. Interestingly, when I flipped it over, you can see a manufacturing flaw – the glaze has pooled against the interior wall, and instead of vitrifying uniformly, it has bubbled and produced a very messy surface.

However, it won’t be seen because it is a what? “A closed vessel, Mr Hamnett”, chorused everyone – good to see you are paying attention. It also illustrates why it was probably unwise to reuse these bottles – if it contained milk (raw and unpasteurised, of course), there is no way you could hope to get that clean enough, even with a steriliser.

Bottom right. An interesting sherd… honest. It is a slip-glazed earthernware vessel, and to judge from the colour of the fabric (the clay itself) and the colour of the glaze, as well as the way it flakes away, it is probably 18th Century. Of course, I could be wrong… but there is something about that sherd that gives it an early-ish date.

Glass! Top is from a corked beer bottle… probably. Certainly corked, not capped or screw threaded, and almost certainly beer. And likely Victorian, or early Edwardian.

Middle is probably a Victorian mineral water bottle. The glass is thick and has an embossed ‘&’ sign and some other marks visible, which would have been the name of the maker and their logo. Without doing a lot of serious research, it would be very difficult to say who made it, as a lot of companies were called ‘Something & Something‘. That stated, there were so many mineral water companies that the bottles tended not to travel far, so theoretically there can’t be that many in the area, so it might be worth a look.

Bottom is just a bottle fragment, again probably from a mineral water bottle. i include it here because a) it is a blueish colour, and so potentially earlier than the rest, and b) it has two air bubbles trapped in the glass. At first I thought that it might have been hand blown, but no, I think it is just a feature of the manufacture. What is fun, though, is the fact that within those bubbles lies a tiny amount of Victorian air, preserved for eternity. I wonder what the Victorian period smelled like? Actually, on second thoughts…

So, nothing truly award winning, but a little slice of Glossop history nonetheless.

Just as I was about to walk away, I turned over a stone, and found the other side was flat and dressed.

It is a sandstone, and not local to the area as far as I can tell, but then I am no geologist. The dressing can be more clearly seen in this photograph, with the low winter sun picking out the chisel marks.

Stone 2 — The dressing clearly shown, with a possible mis-hit on the right.

Obviously it was once part of a building, but what part? Maybe a door or window lintel perhaps? I don’t think it is particularly old, and it is quite a coarse dressing, so perhaps it is from a worker’s cottage or similar. The bank in this area seems to have been shored up against erosion, and it probably building demolition rubble dumped here from nearby.

As always, comments are welcome.

I shall post more in a day or so… this time on the subject of Victoria Bridge. Probably!

Archaeology

More Shelf Brook Sherds

September 30, 2017September 30, 2017 Tim Campbell-GreenLeave a comment

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:

More Shelf Brook Sherds — The haul of pottery!

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!

Archaeology · Oddities

The Letter ‘R’

September 21, 2017September 21, 2017 Tim Campbell-Green2 Comments

At the bottom of St Mary’s Road, on the left hand side, and just behind the back yard of The Retreat beauty salon, there is a gatepost next to the footpath. It is a fairly standard, if precisely carved, gatepost, and much like many of the others you would find in the area. However, this one has a large upper case letter ‘R’ carved expertly into its face.

Letter R 1 — The letter ‘R’ beautifully carved.

I have no clue why it was carved, nor who did it, nor when. The buildings in this part of Glossop centre are among the oldest (1840’s or thereabouts), and the letter style certainly suggests Victorian origin, and probably early Victorian – the large serifs recalls Georgian lettering. It has clearly been used as a gatepost multiple times, with different gate sizes and shapes, and even paint colours – you can see the evidence in the form of holes and paint. Importantly, most of these were placed over the carving, so post-date it.

Letter R 2 — Use and re-use – the evidence of the holes, fixings, and paint.

I checked the early maps for any idea, but nothing was shown that may explain its origin. I haven’t had time to check the census records, and these may shed some light on it, but as it stands… no idea! Whilst looking at the post, I found a child’s toy marble in the gutter – not a particularly old one, but it has seen some use, and is covered in scratches and chips. So obviously, I picked it up!

Marble — I can’t resist a find, even if it is not quite archaeology.

Any thoughts or suggestions regarding the letter on a postcard please (or you could just, you know, post a comment below).

Archaeology

Shelf Brook Sherds

August 29, 2017August 30, 2017 Tim Campbell-Green1 Comment

During the sunny weather we had a few weeks ago, James (my son), myself, and some mummy friends decamped to Manor Park for the swings, slides and climbing frames. Now, James is 18 months old and desperate to explore the world around him, so when we decided to plonk our children into Shelf Brook for a spot of paddling and water-based hi-jinx, he took to it like a duck to… well, you get the idea. The brook at that point is shallow and slow moving, perfect for picking up stones and throwing them, something he loved doing.

But it is, I have noticed, also a great place to find bits of pottery and other interesting bits lying in the brook. This was our hoard for the day:

Shelf Brook Sherds — They don’t look like much, but I like them!

I found the piece on the left, immediately recognising it as part of a marmalade jar – it is a gray glazed stoneware, with characteristic vertical ridges on the exterior. I say marmalade, but actually they contained all sorts of preserved fruit, with a paper label pasted onto the exterior to say what is within. Date wise, they are long-lived… so anywhere between 1870 and 1920, or thereabouts. You can still buy them, sometimes with the labels intact, quite easily – on ebay for example. Here’s what they look like when whole: Marmalade

I actually have a whole one that I managed to piece together from a dozen sherds I found on a Victorian tip, and it now holds pens and pencils. Sherds of this type are quite a common find, and as they are so recognisable you start to see them everywhere, as future blog posts will show.

The sherd on the right was actually found by James – a proud father/son moment… his first piece of pottery! Of course, being 18 months old, he simply threw it back into the brook where it made an audible ‘plop!’. It’s a sherd of roughly painted, almost sponge ware, pottery, and quite a lovely one too, with a sort of floral leafy design in a beautiful blue colour. It is difficult to see what the original form of the sherd was – probably a bowl or plate. The date is difficult, too. I would guess Victorian, and potentially early Victorian.

Both of these sherds have been rolling around the Shelf Brook for 100+ years, and the wear pattern on each tells that story. Both are discoloured by the peat brown water coming down from the moors – the marmalade jar particularly so – and both show signs of worn edges. The longer a piece of pottery has spent being tossed about by the water and banging into stones, the more worn it gets, and eventually the edges will become so rounded that it resembles a pebble. The marmalade jar has comparatively sharp edges, but this is probably due to the fact that, as a stone-ware, it has been fired at a higher temperature and is very hard wearing. The decorated sherd is less fortunate, and has already become rounded at the edges. Interestingly, the glaze on this sherd is crazed – that is, it is covered in tiny cracks. Heat is the usual cause of this, and as it is not a cooking pot, we may assume that the vessel was at some stage placed in an oven either to heat up, or to keep food warm, and probably many times before the vessel was broken.

As we were pulling the sherds out of the brook and looking at them (there were plenty of them, but these were the two that caught my eye), my friend asked “how did they get here?”. Actually, a very good question.

There are potentially two ways. The first is that there is a Victorian tip upstream somewhere, and the material is washing out of the bank. Possible, but I don’t know of any tip upstream (not that that is a guarantee of anything). The second, more probably route, is that at some stage along the course of Shelf Brook, someone threw the pottery into the water. Humans are essentially lazy, and it is almost an archaeological law that people will only move rubbish as far as they have to in order to no longer be able to see or smell it. And no further. The brook offers a perfect place to dump waste and rubbish, and as pottery is virtually indestructible, it washed up here in the calm and shallow area before the sluice. For all the good they did us, the Victorians were some serious litter louts.

Anyway, as usual, keep your eyes open, and any comments, please let me know.

Archaeology

Bottle Top on Bank Street

August 20, 2017August 29, 2017 Tim Campbell-Green3 Comments

I found an interesting thing the other day. I was walking down Bank Street, down to Milltown on the way to the park. For those of you who don’t know it, it is a cobbled path (setts, actually!) that winds its way through demolished mill-scapes, and which allows access to High Street East. I nearly wrote ‘easy access’, but with a push-chair it is a nightmare! That said, I really like it. It has the air of a long forgotten path, Tolkein-esque, leading to who knows what adventure.

The path through Mirkwood, to the Lonely Mountain!

I want to do a longer post on Bank Street at some stage in the near future – it is interesting and full of history. It was originally believed to follow the path of a Roman road, although more recent research suggests, however, that this is in fact an early-modern (16th Century or so) track.

However, for now, I want to share my find.

Bottle Top 1 — The screw-thread can be seen winding around the base.

It is a bottle stop made from vulcanised rubber. It had eroded out of the side of the path from behind a partly ruined wall, and was just lying on top of a trickle of soil on the left hand side going up. The screw-thread winds into the neck of a thick-walled glass bottle containing a carbonated liquid – often a soft drink such as water, but also beer. Originally it would have had a soft rubber ring around the cap that would form a seal to keep the drink fresh until it was unscrewed. The design was patented in the early 1880’s by Henry Barrett, and immediately became very popular, with various design improvements ensuring the basic concept was in use for nearly 100 years. Generally speaking, though, the date of such a screw top is roughly 1890-1920, after which time the crimped rim top became popular. There is a really interesting website that details quite a bit about these bottle stops here.

More interestingly, and as was quite common, the top of the screw cap carried the logo of the company manufacturing the drink inside the bottle – in this instance, the company is Jewsbury and Brown Ltd, Manchester.

Bottle Top 2 — Jewsbury & Brown Ltd. Manchester. The preservation on the bottle top is wonderful.

Jewsbury and Brown were a large company founded in 1826 and based in Manchester, their premises being at 113 Market Street, and later Ardwick Green. They produced carbonated drinks that were sold in Lancashire and the north, and beyond, until they were bought out by Schweppes in 1964. A bit of internet research reveals that they specialised in non-alcoholic carbonated drinks, fizzy water, and toothpaste – but, disappointingly, never beer! Here is a bit of their history, but much more is available online with a little search.

I love this – not just a bit of archaeology that quite literally threw itself at me, but a real tangible insight into the lives of those of the past. There was nothing else associated with the screw-top, and one gets the impression that it was simply unscrewed from the bottle and thrown over the wall, the thrower determined to drink whatever was within the bottle in a single sitting. Let’s imagine them walking along that uneven path when they did it, clogs striking the setts, perhaps on a hot summer’s day, and at the end of a long shift in the mill, appreciating the fizzy drink playing on their tongue… 100+ years ago.

It’s a neat little thing, and one that will be added to the collection. It also makes me wonder what else is behind that wall, waiting to tumble out, so keep your eyes peeled!