l80 WITH REMARKS UPON THE OBJECTS FOUND. 



would be made in a very primitive manner. In Janvier's 

 Practical Kcvamics it is stated that in England a kiln is •• generally 

 a low, vaulted chamber, with a cone-shaped stack. In very 

 rough pottery baking there is no regular kiln at all, the pots 

 themselves being piled up on a sort of floor, and arranged to let 

 the flames play over and through them." It is possible that 

 rude kilns might have been made by piling up the pans 

 surrounded by faggots, and covering in the whole with clay, in 

 the fashion of charcoal-burning, but with a kind of flue at top 

 to allow of the requisite high temperature being attained. To 

 prevent the pots collapsing it is suggested that the T-pieces, the 

 upright with the foot (Fig. 2, E), and the double prong (Fig. 4) 

 were joined with a lump of clay in the middle, as shown in Fig. 

 5. We took this idea from the explanations of our old friend 

 the potter at Waltham Abbey (see above), who was well 

 acquainted with the primitive methods employed in his young 

 days ; but this suggestion is a purely tenative one, and may De 

 confuted by the results of further explorations. When the 

 firing was finished, the demolishment of these primitive kilns 

 would set free great quantities of more or less perfectly 

 burnt " red-earth." 



If these vessels were really the objective of the pottery- 

 making, to what use were the pots or pans — some of them 

 nearly two feet in diameter — put by the workers at the Red-hills ? 



One recalls the late Rev. J. C. Atkinson's paper, " Some 

 further notes on the Salting Mounds of Essex," 4 in which he 

 suggests that the Red-hills were ancient Salinas or salt-pans. He 

 gives a very considerable amount of indirect evidence in favour 

 of this supposition, and the paper is well worthy of careful 

 study in connection with the problem. Our President, Mr. 

 Miller Christy, F.L.S., in his paper on " The History of Salt- 

 making in Essex," read before the Club on April 7th, 1906, but 

 not yet published, pointed out how numerous were these " salt- 

 cotes " on the shores of our Essex estuaries and inlets in the time 

 of the Domesday Survey. 5 The sites of the salt-pans plotted on 

 the map exhibited by Mr. Christy were roughly coincident with 

 many of the existing Red-hills, and the seeker for a raison d'etre 



4 A rchaolozical Journal, Vol. xxxvii. (1880), p. 196. 



5 See also Mr. Horace Round's Essay on the Survey in the Victoria History. He says 

 that '"the distribution of the salt-pans was in Essex extremely local, being virtually 

 restricted to the Hundreds of Tendring, Winstree, and sThurstable in the N,E. of the 

 •county." 



