Tiny Pottery Dog's Head found in Garden
Archaeology
By Heather at Exeter
A few years ago while digging my garden West of the Exe I suddenly noticed a tiny pale coloured face looking up at me out of the soil. I knew at once it was shaped like a dog with a long nose and big floppy ears and that it was made from white clay.
Pieces of old broken pottery are often found in gardens left from times past when cart loads of manure were used to fertilise agricultural land such as fields and orchards. The remains of all sorts of household rubbish and scraps ended up in the cart and it all got spread on the soil and worked in.
Some of these finds can date back hundreds of years but many of them from the mid to late 19th Century.
Little clay figures were quite common during that time, usually pressed in metal moulds using white, red or black clay. They were often produced as toys, whistles or fairground shooting targets. A number of them originate from Germany although they are not always easy to trace as they were copied all over Europe.
This piece turned out to be the feature on the base of a clay smoking pipe where the dog's head served as a decorative handle for the smoker to hold while packing tobacco into the bowl. Decorated pipes of this kind were popular from about 1860 to 1920 and I was able to find an almost identical drawing in a supplier’s catalogue dating from 1879, that of a Manchester firm.