Why is there so much pottery and little clay tubes in this farmers field?

[Circletime27]

Our estate backs onto a field. We’ve never walked in it before but since the lockdown we’ve been using it to walk our dog in (it has a public footpath running through it before anyone tells us off).

It’s absolutely full of little bits of broken pottery and bits of white pipes with very narrow holes running through.

Where’s it all come from?

They're old clay pipes! We find loads in our garden. I'd love to know more too.

The little white pipes are the stems of old clay pipes (smoking pipes not drain pipes). Your estate is built on or near the spoil heap of an old pottery. Street names around you might be a clue - locally, we have Potovens Lane.

www.havanahouse.co.uk/history-clay-pipe/

You need to watch a The Detectorists

We had this behind our house when I was a child. The fields had previously been allotments for many years, and was littered with bits of broken crockery and clay pipes.

Yes I’d love to find out more. DS has just come back with the other end of the pipe-the bit they’d hold! I didn’t even realise they were actual smoking pipes. I wonder how old they are. Going to do some googling.

I love detectorists!

In those days, clay pipes were sold with a single charge of tobacco. So you would smoke it and throw it away. Even if you kept it, it would break quite quickly.

I'd love to live near a field like that

Imagine if all the cigarette butts thrown away over the last century were made of something completely indestructible. Imagine how many you’d find littering up the place in five hundred years time. That. (Well, not quite that, because I imagine that very few people could have afforded a forty clay pipes a day habit, but you get my drift).

Ah that sounds a bit rubbish when you put it like that-were collecting cigarettes butts 😆

*we’re