A Hard Place

Wild West Yorkshire Nature Diary,
Friday 29th October 1999, page 3/3

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Stony Hill

The Anglo Saxon name, Storrs may mean 'stony place', It was the kind of land, on the border between two villages which, too steep and rocky for ploughing, became a place where pigs would be turned out to forage.

Similar elements in place names, storo and storca, refer a place where brush wood is gathered or a place where storks nest.

The Victorians built an isolation hospital for smallpox here and Rock House, a mansion on the hilltop, which probably belonged to the owners of a woollen mill in the valley. The Victorians had a rubbish dump here, old bottles and fragments of pottery can be found mixed in with the ash.

tureen fragment A year ago I picked up a fragment of pottery in a ploughed field on top of the hill and passed it on to a student of archaeology at York University, Bridie Wright. She tells me;

Apparently, the ware is ironstone/white granite, common during the period 1845 - 1850 AD. The decoration is a black underglaze print. The tree/lake/mountain motif is very common, particularly c. 1830 - 1870. The date therefore for the piece is between 1850 and 1870, though Alisdair Brookes, the expert, thinks it more likely a later rather than earlier piece.
The form of the fragment suggests a large fluted jug or a tureen lid - Alisdair "leans towards latter from top of profile" There is no way to identify the factory of origin from just one fragment.
Alisdair did mention something about the pot being typical of the type made for the American market, but failed to expand on this theory in his results.

My thanks to Bridie and Alisdair.

Richard Bell,
wildlife illustrator
E-mail; 'richard@daelnet.co.uk'

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