Broken pottery in garden - why?

[Lindyboo]

I feel a bit daft asking this question, but curiosity compels me. I’m sure we’ve all dug up shards of pottery/porcelain in our gardens but does anyone have theories about why it’s there in quantity? I can readily understand that over the centuries things get broken, but in days before refuse collection services, would broken pottery have been just chucked outside?

I ask because there’s such an abundance of it here, especially at one corner of the house. It’s chinaware, I suppose, in that it’s mostly white and glazed with underglazed patterns of various sorts. Every time it rains and exposes a bit more soil, more pieces show up all over the garden. At first I thought it was litter until close inspection showed it to be thousands of bits of crock. As far as we know there’s no history of the house having been a potter’s workshop – census records show agricultural use only.

Alas no Viking swords yet found, but I live in hope.

 

[LadyArowana]

No idea on the answer to your question, but maybe you should collaborate with Joce and collect them up so she can use them in her grotto one day!

 

[JoceAndChris]

No thanks to even more bits of broken pot (yes to any shells going spare there - it's to be a shell grotto).

Yes, the garden functioned as a rubbish dump and there'd have been a fire pit somewhere too. Broken crockery doesn't burn very well. It might sound messy but their rubbish output would have been so minimal, most things had a resale value and even rags were recycled (if not actually sold) into rag rugs, bones were boiled to make glue, scraps went to animals, packaging as we know it didn't exist. So you're left with rusting agricultural equipment that got forgotten, bits of broken glass and crockery and decrepit fenceposts and other building waste - my garden is still full as there was no collection here until the 80s and all the previous owners appear to have been messy hoarders. I love looking at the crockery, some of it is so pretty.

The other point to make is that it's hard for the modern householder to imagine how much crockery was got through. Big families, and if middle class then definitely a servant, and lots of little courses following eachother in little dishes and cups of tea and high tea and saucers and sandwich plates and china shepherdesses and millions of china knick-knacks everywhere. You only need 5 mins with a '30s recipe book to realise people were needed in the kitchen right round the clock and the scullery would have been much busier than the modern dishwasher.

 

[steveb]

even in our 2 up 2 down farmworkers cottage - so no big kitchen, scullery or servants - we have managed to find a garden full of broken glass, crockery and bricks - predominantly in the corners but pretty much anywhere you put a fork you'll come up with a piece of a brick.

No real idea of the age of most of it, but I would guess most of it was dumped in the 1900s. It was used as a beerhouse for some time around the turn of last century but the only useful find so far was half of the rusting frame of the original pub sign. Searching for the other half has so-far been fruitless.

 

[dalivar]

Joce, have you seen the shell grotto at Eaton Hall in Cheshire?! I think you might like that, its amazing!

 

[JoceAndChris]

No, I haven't visited- I'd love to - thanks! Shell grottoes are fascinating.

even in our 2 up 2 down farmworkers cottage - so no big kitchen, scullery or servants - we have managed to find a garden full of broken glass, crockery and bricks - predominantly in the corners but pretty much anywhere you put a fork you'll come up with a piece of a brick.

No real idea of the age of most of it, but I would guess most of it was dumped in the 1900s. It was used as a beerhouse for some time around the turn of last century but the only useful find so far was half of the rusting frame of the original pub sign. Searching for the other half has so-far been fruitless.

They'd have needed somewhere to wash the pots- maybe a corner of a room rather than a purpose made scullery. And chores like that were often shoved out in outbuildings, evn of a very ramshackle and make-shift kind. There might have been a girl - a child - to come and help for a tiny bit of pocket money - you read Dickens and see that even the very poorest still had the culture of servants, as they do in India today.

My grandmother was the cook at Horton Court in the early part of the 20th C, there wasn't a lot of spare money but her home was stuffed with china - probably a lot of chipped hand-me downs but she couldn't stand to see an empty bit of surface.

 

[TheForge]

No, I haven't visited- I'd love to - thanks! Shell grottoes are fascinating.

When I was at University in Bristol I was lucky enough to live in Goldney Hall with it's spectacular shell lined grotto, built from the ballast that returned in Thomas Goldney's ships from the West Indies in the 18th century. http://www.bristol.ac.uk/goldney/goldneyhallhistory/goldneyfollies/

I think it's been used a few times in films and TV programs such as Chronicles of Narnia and 28 Days Later. The gardens were the main location for the BBC drama The Best of Men that was on the other day.





The tiles on the floor were made by Abraham Darby before he moved to Coalbrookdale and his initials are in a mosaic on the roof!

The house is open to the public on a couple of days each year and well worth a visit - I used to do the tours of the grotto when I was a student there!

 

[Roger H]

I don't recall a shell grotto scene in '28 Days Later'. Remind me?

 

[Lindyboo]

[/quote]They'd have needed somewhere to wash the pots- maybe a corner of a room rather than a purpose made scullery. And chores like that were often shoved out in outbuildings, evn of a very ramshackle and make-shift kind.[/quote]

You might be onto something there. The old maps show a tiny outbuilding right next to the spot where most of the crockery has been found. Perhaps later excavations might show some sort of foundations.

 

[TheForge]

I don't recall a shell grotto scene in '28 Days Later'. Remind me?

I'm not sure if they used the grotto but I think they used the gardens - I've never seen the film so would have no idea!

 

[lordmulberry]

Perhaps they were just dumped there.

One of Lady Mulberry's ancestors was a dentist who practised from his house in Swindon and he used to throw extracted teeth into the garden from his surgery. :shock:

 

[middi]

I can tell you exactly why there is a lot of pottery sherds in your garden.

A lady lived there with her husband, 9 children and two sets of grandparents ( hence load of pottery)
One day the lady of the house asked her husband to build her a shelf to hold all the excess pottery that could not be housed in the already full dresser. He built the shelf, his wife loaded it up with all the pottery overspill, within seconds the shelf came crushing down it hits the edge of the dresser and this followed down to the floor.
All the pottery is B*****red, she swears and and screams at him . With a typical English way to calm the situation he says - " don't worry darling I shall clear this lot up and bury it in the garden, tomorrow we will go on a shopping trip to Harrods and we will purchase a brand new dinner service", At which point she smiles, kisses him and winks suggesting there are better things to come that evening.
If this had happened in Italy she would have put a contract on him. You should al be proud to be English.

( well, I may be right :wink: )

Middi

 

[Owain]

Pieces of pottery are used in the base of plant pots for drainage. Therefore it is likely to accumulate in places where plants are potted or de-potted and the used growing medium and bits of pot is chucked away behind a (former) gardener's hut or greenhouse etc.

 

[MatthewC]

Joce - have you been to the Shell Garden on Jersey?

(I think it's a bit OTT myself!)

 

[Flyfisher]

I came across a rubbish pit when digging a new drain. It wasn't that large (or I just found the edge of it) but contained some bits of broken pottery and glass and a lot of burned stuff and what looked like ashes/clinker from coal fires. I presume this was how they disposed of rubbish in the days before the dustcart. There was also an unbroken and rather nice small deep blue bottle - a medicine bottle perhaps?

As for shell grottos, there's a Grade 1 listed example in Ware, Hertfordshire, which dates from the 1760s: http://www.scotts-grotto.org

Fortunately it was saved from near destruction by a housing development in the 1960s:

John Scott's daughter, Maria, inherited her father's estate when he died in 1783. Following her death in 1863, the estate was sold to a property development company, and Scotts Road was built. The grotto was included in the garden for a large house on Scotts Road, but this was demolished in the 1960s to make way for house building. The builder planned to erect two houses on the land the grotto occupied. Work was stopped, but sadly the porch and the roof of the Council Chamber had already been demolished.

In 1974 East Herts Council acquired the land and carried out badly needed basic repairs, including re-roofing the Council Chamber in 1978. In 1987 the Ware Society, a local conservation group, suggested a full-scale restoration scheme. This included replacing the demolished porch and rebuilding the summerhouse. Restoration work took place in 1990 and the grotto was formally re-opened by Lord Montagu of Beaulieu in 1991. The grotto has been designated by English Heritage as a Grade I listed building. The garden, including the summerhouse, is Grade II*
http://www.eastherts.gov.uk/grotto

 

[JoceAndChris]

Thanks for all the lovely shell grotto porn - astonishing! I must make the effort to visit these, despite wanting a shell grotto badly, I've only looked at them in books.

 

[Matt Green]

You should have seen Shell Haven near Thurrock. Wondrous, but lost to us now.

 

[Gareth Hughes]

You should have seen Shell Haven near Thurrock. Wondrous, but lost to us now.

Really?

 

[Onetap]

I can readily understand that over the centuries things get broken, but in days before refuse collection services, would broken pottery have been just chucked outside?

I think everything did. Metal could have been recycled or would have rusted away, everything else would have rotted, leaving just the pot sherds.
Future generations will marvel at the quantities of our abandoned plastic, especially the Lego bricks.

Or else it was the only Greek Taverna in the village.

 

[Flyfisher]

Abandoned Lego bricks? :shock: What a travesty!

When I outgrew my Lego collection it was consigned to the attic. A few years after FF junior's arrival it was brought back into service and a whole load of new Lego was added to it (including the rather wonderful programmable Mindstorms kits that I, er, he spent considerable time with). Now that FF junior has grown out of this Lego collection (for the time being) it has again been consigned to the attic pending the possible future arrival of the next FF generation and, no doubt, more additions to the collection.

In short, who on earth would ever throw Lego away?