XXX11. THE NEW FOREST. 



SECOND SUMMER MEETING. 



THE NEW FOREST. 



Thursday, 3rd July. 



The Field Club assembled at Ringwood Station, the 

 main purpose of the meeting being to examine the Romano- 

 British pottery works in that district. 



Mr. Nelson M. Richardson, the President, was accompanied 

 by the Rev. H. Pentin, Canon Mansel-Pleydell, Captain 

 Elwes, Mr. Alfred Pope, and about 85 members and their 

 friends. 



Under the guidance of Mr. Heywood Sumner. F.S.A., the 

 party set out for the potteries at Sloden, where the spoil 

 heaps yielded many specimens of broken shards, some of 

 which had been decorated by the craftsmen of the Roman 

 period. 



After an inspection of the site, the members drove on 

 through the Forest to the second pottery works at Island's 

 Thorn, where Mr. SUMNER addressed them on the history of 

 the two undertakings, as derived from excavations and 

 similar evidence. 



These potteries, at Sloden and Island's Thorn, were Romano -British 

 potteries of a commercial character. Here coarse, hard ware was 

 made and hawked about the country for sale, presumably on pack- 

 horses, judging by the trackways which one saw leading to and from 

 the potteries. There was one good example near God's Hill, called on 

 the Ordnance Map a " supposed camp," but really an old pack-horse 

 way, and the natural road from the Sloden potteries to Cranborne 

 Chase. The potteries had been excavated to a certain extent, but 

 not thoroughly, because the trees had always interfered with any 

 excavators' work. Mr. Bartlett, who made these excavations in 1853, 

 as recorded in Archceologia, found kilns with their floors intact, but not 

 their side walls. They had a sort of brick earth remaining round the 

 side walls, but none of them were perfect ; and unfortunately the 

 plans which Mr. Bartlett drew of the sites of the kilns were drawn with 

 the compass, and thus did not show how the kilns were made. It was 

 supposed that wood was used as fuel, and that then, as nowadays, the 



