Autumn Cottage Diarist

Digging up the Past at Autumn Cottage

Making a backbreaking gardening job more interesting by looking out for 'treasures'

 

 

Feeling Like a Snail…

A rather flooded veg garden

So many months of cold, wet weather interspersed with freezing, dark and snowy days - I am feeling so like a snail right now - head still tucked in, trying to stay dry while the land is soaked, over and over again.

The grass squelches where we walk and there is a small river issuing from the ditch at the top side of the house, which is happily wending its way into the veggie garden and greenhouse. If only I WAS a snail, perhaps I could glide merrily over the surface, rather than sinking into or skidding on the mud that now abounds. Perhaps I would be happy to be in this constant wet weather - not thoroughly fed up with the endless gloom and cold. Will proper springtime ever come?

Hellebores and tete-a-Tete Narcissi in the front garden

Well - yes, it will. Even in this morose weather, the Green Fuse is alight - plants are bursting up out of the mud, there was a dawn chorus worth listening to at the end of last week and - on the principle that it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good - or in my case an ill downpour…the torrents have washed away soil in the ditch at the bottom of the garden and - look what I found this morning!

A large section of what I think is probably a little Victorian terracotta mixing bowl; too small to be a Pancheon - a larger, bread-mixing bowl. I also think that there is more…I can see other fragments of something very close to where this piece was found, but - (intense irritation here…!!) - I can't reach them at the moment!! I'm being prevented from doing so by a water filled ditch with sides too steep to get a purchase upon.

I retrieved the piece this morning with a VERY long handled fishing net, so - as soon as the weather improves and the ditch dries out - guess where I will be looking? Perhaps you can see the other bits still up under the hedge roots? (just above where 'X marks the spot'). As ever...watch this space - who knows what else was tossed away there when broken? - and who knows what else I will discover!!

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It's been quite a week for parts of the Western World, hasn't it? and not one I have relished. Polarised opinions, anger and anxiety and that feeling - as I look into the future - of wondering what exactly will happen next?

When the pressures of the world weigh heavily on my shoulders, I turn to the natural world, and so it was today; I turned my back on the whole gamut of social media and the world of so many words which seem to ricochet around and sting right now, and took off - with my camera - to one of the places which truly does restore my soul.

The ancient ceremonial pathways and stone circle of Avebury henge have received humans for thousands of years - all seeking their own spiritual restoration and affirmation in one way or another. Today I walked those paths of the ancestors and they received me - on a dark, drizzling day with few other people around.

The stones were massive, lowering and grey - quite different to walking with them on a sunny summer's day - but they were good company. They just stood and listened - and I was restored, ready to face forward again, towards February 1st and Imbolc, the first festival of the Celtic year, a celebration of the first hopeful signs of spring.

Bring on the milk and fire of Brigid - the stones have got my back!

Exquisite decoration on a clay beaker - which may have been made like this....

In life...the tools used by Neolithic housekeepers

In death - fragmented bone cremains in a decorated urn

3000 years between them - two foci of spiritual sustenance - the Stone Circle and the Church

Facing forward towards Springtime - the lovely volunteers of the National Trust, grubbing out blighted Box Balls in preparation for the Mid-February re-opening of Avebury Manor. Doesn't that lovely smile cheer up the dreariest day?

 

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There was I...Digging this 'ole...

The most modest planting can turn up the most interesting finds here at Autumn Cottage. Placing a small clematis just now on the trellis at the back of the garage, this is what I turned up out of the hole...

Its a fragment of a saucer, I think - Victorian, and decorated with either sponge or stick printing. I have found other pieces here at other times, but never one as large as this - about 2 inches (5 cm) across the rim.

Here is where I found it...

The arrow marks the spot where I dug the hole - as you can see, the trellis lines up with the (front of the) old Victorian loo - where there was originally a hedge, we believe...so the earth here holds all sorts of discarded treasures that would have been tossed over the hedge when they were broken.

I've always thought that it would be interesting to use the pattern as a motif for all sorts of crafts - I feel a papier mache bowl coming on sometime soon - decorated in red and blue :-)

I-Spy Treasure at the Bottom of The Garden!

 

Hello everyone! Many weeks since I have posted here, I know. Spring has sprung at Autumn Cottage and I have been busy living life rather than writing about it - I hope you have been enjoying doing so as well! All of my days at the moment are spent in catching up with all the things that I did not do last year - a large part of which effort is consumed with attempting to conquer the dishevelled garden.

I had help there this past week - (which I will update you about soon over at Autumn Cottage Garden Safaris) from my younger son Tim, part of which entailed his clearing of the ditch at the bottom of the garden. You can see in the photographs above where the bank has been cleared of weeds.

Praise and thanks had already been given to him for the work done there (I hope to plant the boggy ditch soon with springtime bog-garden flowers such as primulas) - but while I was further admiring his work today, something buried, looking 'un-plant-y' caught my eye...

'X' marks the spot in the image above where I espied some sort of rim in the ground...('Y' indicates my trowel handle, stuck in the ground, for size comparison). As you can imagine, the trowel got busy once I saw what might be buried there! The soil was loose and came away easily, revealing this lovely pot-sherd: made in soft terracotta, wheel thrown and decorated with a hand-scratched pattern below the rim. As you can also see, it is quite a size - about nine inches long against the one-foot ruler.

The glazed inside of the pot

The curve on the sherd shows just how big it must have been when intact - I matched it to the manhole cover on a drain in the garden - it was almost of the same curvature - and the manhole cover is 30 inches in diameter - quite some pot!

I suspect the pot to have been a shallow dough mixing/proving bowl from a Victorian kitchen here at the cottage, but cannot be sure. Any archaeologists reading this? Your opinion would be more than welcome - but I think I need to to take a visit to a museum to get this properly identified.