We have been collecting a terrific collection of broken pottery, glass, coins and other objects from the garden, none of them older than the 19th century, and all of them completely valueless, but what an endless source of fascination! It was a tradition started just for fun by my mother in my parents’ first home, and one that we pursued in the numerous gardens that followed. If one looks closely enough, with every turn of the spade gardens can produce fragments of a home’s previous lives. At the end of this page is a hyperlinked list of all the posts to date that are dedicated to objects we have found in the garden.
Buildings are oddly vulnerable. The bigger they are, the more costly they are to maintain, and there have been some truly tragic losses. Some became unfashionable and were knocked down to be replaced by more up to date versions. Death duties have crippled some estates, and whilst some have been saved by the National Trust or independent tourist programmes, others have been too costly to maintain without prosperous estates to support them. Many of those hanging on by a thread were maimed to the point of no return by military occupation during the Second World War and fell into decay before being pulled down. The demolished Emral Hall and Broughton Hall, both near Worthenbury, pull hopelessly at the heartstrings. By contrast, much smaller properties have a better chance of survival because they are not as costly to maintain. Many manorial lodges and villages survive long after the demolition of the manor, and proceed to evolve in new directions.
Objects, things that were first imagined and then created by human endeavour often combine to form parts of the story of longstanding homes. The things that we dig out of gardens are inherently disposable and are often far more successful survivors of past indignities than buildings, relics of previous realities and other lives. The smaller and more everyday that something is, the more likely it is to be broken and subsequently discarded. Broken objects found on archaeological sites or in modern gardens usually began their lives as the items least valued by their owners. This is why so much of archaeology is based on domestic pottery. Easy to manufacture, cheap to purchase, and subjected to every form of indignity, pots, plates, cups and tiles break easily and are thrown away.
Only very rarely do lucky archaeologists or gardeners find, for example, much in the way of Roman helmets, coin hoards, Celtic shields, Fabergé eggs or diamond tiaras. I wish! These are, of course, rare and exceptional objects, usually encountered only in museum or art gallery cabinets bristling with security. In the field, if they are found at all, they are usually in graves or other specialized sites. That’s because people tend to take care of valuable items, ensure that they are buried with them, bequeath them to descendants, sell them to collectors, donate them to museums or, when they become more valuable as a raw material, recycle them into other objects.
J.F. Edisbury and Co trademark.
Bottle found in my garden.
It is the everyday objects, or their surviving fragments, that archaeologists today are able to use to build up impressions of past livelihood. It is these fragments of everyday people that make up the bulk of our knowledge of how life was lived on a day to day basis, not the riches that reflect the lives of the rich and famous, although they too add something important to the overall picture.
Most of the tiny broken elements of domestic life suggest that the owners of this house in the 19th and early 20th centuries could afford some of the niceties of life, but not necessarily the luxuries. Every find, no matter how trivial, is a good moment, and once in a while something turns up that is very well worth drawing attention to. Two bottles, for example, bear the embossed name of the companies that sold, respectively, beer (the Chester Lion Brewery) and fizzy soft drinks and medicines (Edisbury’s of Wrexham) at the end of the 19th Century, and these both tell truly absorbing stories about the era that produced them. In fact, there are so many bits of bottle and jar (both glass and stoneware) that I begin to wonder if a previous owner was a distributor of beers and mineral waters. If not, the house’s occupants seem to have downed a lot of fizzy drinks in the late 19th Century!
Overall, the never-to-be-completed jigsaw puzzle is its own comment on the way in which rural houses accumulate and discard objects of everyday life, and finding them turns out to be its own reward. The posts about the objects that we have found are shown in the order in which they were discovered.
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#1 – A late 19th Century bottle in the garden: The Chester Lion Brewery
#2 – A late 19th Century bottle in the garden: J.F. Edisbury and Co. Ltd.
#3 – A curious find: the head of a small figurine, possibly a pie crust support
#4 – A damaged SEPECAT Jaguar fighter plane Dinky Toy – lost or thrown away?
#5 – Fragment of a late 19th Century Codd-neck bottle (bottles sealed with a marble)
#6 – Fragment of a Hamilton / torpedo bottle and a frustrating section of embossed text
#7 – Little fragments of willow pattern china – what are the stories?
#8 – Pieces of 19th century clay tobacco pipe
#10 – Mochaware pottery sherd, with a design emulating moss agate
#11 – A fragment of a bisque ware doll’s head
#12 – A Potter’s mark on a piece of flow blue ware by S.W. Dean, Burslem, Staffordshire
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Based in Churton 