Whilst my mother was planning what to eat, I was taking a rare day off to visit my small nephew (my work is just spiralling at the moment!). In between playing super heroes, where he was Spidey and I was the Increadible Hulk (I know, I am trying not to take it personally), we visited my sister's allotment.
My sister and various friends have clubbed together to start developing a new plot. Well, hardly new as people have been using that ground as an allotment since the nineteenth century probably. At the moment there is only earth, but this is great for a 3 year old boy to play with: just look at those fingernails!
Practicing at planting runner beans, he maintains... but will he eat them!
Anyway, in amongst all that dirt there are treasures: shards and shards of pottery and glass. Teapot handles, inkwells, medicine and beer bottles, ceramic marmalade pots, glass, clay pipes, and who knows what else. I found the following just walking around:
I would love to know what was in the pot with green lettering saying 'FRAN' 'Cloth'. We have often found shards like this in our own garden too:
One birthday, my partner, to surprise me, took one of my shards (or sherds, if we are going to get technical) to the jewellers and commisioned a pendant:
I love it. What have you found in your allotment or garden?PS: Ralph Mills has written an MA about his archeological finds in his allotment: Fires of Prometeus which gets one thinking about everyday archeology.
13 comments:
What a thoughtful gift!
I can't say that I've ever found anything as interesting as your sherds/shards, and I hope that in years to come no one finds some interesting old bones in one corner of my (newly-relinquished) allotment - where three of my cats are buried......
That pendant was a great idea! There are no pieces of pottery or anything else for that matter hiding in the dirt where I live. Our house is in a newly developed area so has no previous human history other than many years ago when Natives would have been roaming through the hills. Hey - maybe I will unearth an arrowhead!
I can't resist picking up fragments of pottery either (although mine are not as interesting as yours) - fragments of old lives. Who from that plate or drank from that cup? In a less throwaway society how awful it must have been to break something too.
What a brilliant idea to make a sherd into a very special piece of jewellery.
Manor Garden Allotments, famously lost to make way for a path on the Olympic site, sat on an old rubbish dump. Every now and then bits, mostly of blue and white pottery or old bottles, would emerge. Scogglers used to dig up too along the edge of the plots where the land dipped deeply towards the banks of teh River Lea.
Upiu are right. It is treasure.
Upiu? Should read you!
I find the occasional pipe stem but nothing as lovely as this.
Just remember - you asked. In my back yard, under the dirt, when we moved in:
Car parts, pool pumps, pots, pans, tableware, hundreds of yards of christmas lights, astro turf, carpeting, plastic toys, a dead dog in a bag, bottles, a few hundred black plastic bags, a few hundred pounds of gravel (which used to be under an above ground pool), broken wrenches and other tools, and some other stuff I can't remember now.
We dug down three feet all over the entire back property, and sifted the dirt with a screen box that Bear made. Then we planted grass and beautiful things, and it became our garden!
Lots of Victorian glass bottles, little green ones, made of thick glass.
When I was small, we had two ancient tin plates on which someone had assembled many sherds of pottery in a mosaic. These being lost in the past, I used the same technique using polyfilla nad all the pottery fragments we had unearthed. It took more than you would expect.
I think sherd jewellery is a brilliant idea.
Weeds mainly. But yes, some blue and white pottery and, most depressingly, a smashed up fire surround that should be in our dining room. A beautiful eau de nil shade. Almost made me cry when I found it.
I have found occasional odditites,but nothing as interesting as your sherds! :)
Post a Comment