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A late site in Market Rasen.
We have always wanted to find and dig a decent site
in the Market Rasen area.
Rasen is a small market town in north central Lincolnshire which, in common with most such towns in Britain, was home to a number of local chemists, brewers, wine and spirit merchants and mineral water makers throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of those small businesses used bottles and pots embossed, impressed, or printed with their own names, but it's only rarely that we have found Market Rasen bottles in any of the locations we've been able to dig in the past (but have a look at the beautiful little 1850s - 60s veterinary medicine bottle that was dug on the Tritton Road Scrapyard site in Lincoln, way back in 1993).
After several years of intermittent searching, in the early summer of 2005 Darren and I finally found a shallow dump in a small field not far from the town. It's always a pleasant surprise when we manage to secure pemission to dig a site, and this time was no exception when, after some discussion with the owner we were granted permission, on condition that we left the place spotless once we were finished.
As the picture below shows, the tip was in a grassy field and turned out to be very shallow. It consisted of turf on top of 6” of topsoil, with between a foot and eighteen inches of old rubbish underneath.
Underneath this was a layer of sandy clay, which was the original ground surface. In some places, as in this picture, the seam was rattling with stuff (which, unfortunately for us, almost always turned out to be relatively uninteresting), and in other places was completely empty, barren, ash. Being quite a late site there was a lot of enamelled kitchen ware, such as the green saucepan visible in this bit of seam.
We dug the site for one or two weekends a month from June 2005 until April 2006, but in that time we only really had a couple of days which turned up anything more interesting than a few common local glass beer bottles.
One of these days was just after Christmas 2005, when the weather was several degrees below freezing. Just a few days before we had had a very cold, wet and unpleasant experience on the Brickyard Lane dump. We needed a day or two on a drier site, and since Rasen was the only other site we had permission for, this was it.
On this day the fog didn't lift, the spoil heap gathered frost whenever we stopped digging for more than a couple of minutes, and toes got very, very cold. The finds, in the picture below, were half a dozen local beers, a local codd bottle from W. B. Jevons / Chemist (just about the only one in really good condition from the whole site), a little stoneware muff warmer from Culbert / Chemist / Connswater, and a few blue poisons and inks. On the left are two broken early saltglaze porters. We found dozens of these on the site, all smashed into little pieces in a way that must have been deliberate. This was a great shame as they all dated to between 60 and 80 years before the date of the tip. This picture also shows one of several very badly broken advertising pieces to come off this site - this one a green pub jug for Grants Whisky, which would have been a real beauty if in good condition. We did eventually get one unbroken pub ashtray advertising White Horse Whisky.
Below is a closer picture of the Culbert muffwarmer. Connswater is in Northern Ireland.
We only had two noteworthy earlier items off the whole tip, both slip glaze porter bottles in the typical Derbyshire grey glaze. The one below is from 'W. Scott / Union Street Brewery / Market Rasen'. It's an uncommon local bottle so we were happy with it. The other porter turned up right at the other end of the tip on just about our last dig there: a huge bottle from 'J. P. Stephenson / Beverley'.
Two of these little half ounce crescent poison bottles turned up, quite close to each other. The embossing down the centre of the front reads 'NOT TO BE TAKEN'.
There were a large number of slab sealed flagons, but every one of them was broken. This one would have been a nice half – gallon bottle from Caistor, if it hadn't been in pieces ......
...... and this would have been a 4 gallon size, with a previously unknown (to us) type of slab seal from Brigg.
This blackbird was there every day we dug during the spring of 2006, getting fat and feeding his chicks on the worms from our spoil heaps.
It's always interesting to find unexpected items that provide that little bit more information than usual. This extremely common white stoneware pot still had a very fragile but fully legible label attached, indicating that it came from 'The Midland Fruit Preserving Co Limited ' of Chesterfield, and that it had once held Raspberry & Gooseberry jam. This photograph was taken as soon as it came out of the ground, and within 5 minutes the label had dried up into a powdery consistency and almost entirely fallen off.
On this site our backfilling and tidying up system worked slightly too well (a problem we sometimes have on grassed sites) because, after several months it became difficult to be sure which areas of the site we had dug, even though we tried to be systematic about it. We ended up getting a bit irritated on one or two occasions due to wasted time spent digging already-dug areas as a result, but at least we managed to dig the whole tip without any problems and leave it at least as tidy as it was before we got there!
The landowner was also very pleased with the result.
AFTERWARDS.
In the end we concluded the site dated to almost exactly 1920, and had almost certainly only been used for rubbish dumping for one or two years. This short period of use is very similar to the Brickyard Lane site, and may be fairly typical of small sites in or near towns. Larger sites, such as the Scrapyard in Lincoln, may have been used for ten or twenty years, or longer.
The contents of this site were noticably patchy, with large amounts of very similar or even identical items (see the list below) deposited in groups, sometimes covering quite wide areas and in almost every case deliberately broken, suggesting large scale clear-outs from shops. This seems to have been something that occurred quite widely in Britain in this period immediately after the First World War: a time of economic, and especially social, upheaval. The rubbish dumps of the time show a sudden change, in less than 10 years, from domination by 'older' Victorian styles of containers to types which look relatively modern even to us in the present day. Codd bottles, transfer printed pot lids, and almost all stoneware bottles largely disappear from use, and hand blown, hand finished glass disappears, to be replaced with entirely machine made items. The period of change seems to have resulted in the dumping of large amounts of items that were suddenly considered to be 'old fashioned', such as the heaps of broken chemists shop items, salt glaze porter bottles and stone ginger beers found on this site.
THE FINAL TALLY:
Total finds worth mentioning were:
So, altogether not the most productive or exciting site in the world*, but it was (usually) fun to dig, and did at least turn up a few interesting bits and pieces.
We are still searching for that elusive pre-World War 1 Market Rasen site, but without any joy so far!
* In fact so far as I'm concerned it was A-Very-Unproductive-Verging-on-Tedious Site. On the other hand Darren really enjoyed it. We have agreed to differ on the issue.
© J. Kemp & D.Gray 2007.
