Fig. 201.—Colchester.
A kiln was discovered in 1868 at Winterton, near Brigg, on a site about half a mile from the Roman road, and not far from where a tesselated pavement had been previously discovered. By the falling of a portion of the side of a pit where sand was being dug, there was exposed a rudely constructed kiln or oven, made by sinking a circular cavity about six feet deep and six feet in diameter at the top, becoming narrower towards the bottom, so as to be in fact an inverted cone. The lower half of it is in the sand, and the upper half in the surface soil, and in a thin bed of clay between this and the sand. A little more than a foot in depth of the bottom of the pit had been filled with soil from the surface, quite compact, as if it had been mixed with water and well rammed down. On the top of this rested the oven itself, formed by lining the pit with a mixture of coarse mud or clay with small stones and pebbles, to a thickness of about four inches at the bottom, increasing upward to ten inches at the brim, which is about one foot and a half below the present surface of the field. From the centre of the floor thus made rises a pillar of one foot nine inches in height, and widening from one foot diameter at the bottom to one foot ten inches at the top, which pillar widens suddenly so as to form a sort of mushroom head, continuous in structure with the clay or mud floor and walls just described. Two shallow grooves run all round the inside of the oven, a little above the top of the pillar, and broken pieces of blue Roman pottery are laid across from the pillar to the side of the basin so as to cover in a sort of circular flue. Over these has been spread a thin coat of clay similar to the rest of the lining, so that the upper storey, so to speak, is a shallow pit, about three and a half feet diameter and one foot and a half deep. A large quantity of black ashes, and of fragments of Roman pottery, was found in and around the kiln. An account of this discovery, with an engraving of the kiln appeared in vol. ix. of “The Reliquary.” Another, in the same county, was discovered near Ancaster; and in Somersetshire a kiln has been uncovered.
Fig. 202.—Little Chester.
Fig. 203.—Cirencester.
Many potteries besides those whose productions have been here spoken of might be described; but as their productions were the usual classes of domestic or sepulchral vessels, or flue and other tiles, it is not perhaps necessary to enumerate them. I will therefore proceed to speak of some of the vessels not already particularised in this chapter.
Fig. 204.—Cirencester.
