Bricket Wood Mortaria Kilns
About
Potters at Little Munden Farm began firing mortaria before the Boudican revolt swept the region in 60 CE, making this one of the earliest workshops in the Verulamium region's Watling Street pottery industry. Kilns here kept stamping mortaria with individual makers' marks for almost a century, alongside sister workshops at Brockley Hill and Radlett. Its position deep in the wooded Colne valley gave potters ready clay and timber fuel just a few miles from Verulamium's walls.
What happened here
The workshop runs as a production line. Clay is dug locally, weathered over winter, kneaded and thrown, or pressed into moulds for the decorated wares. Vessels are dried under cover, stamped with the potter's name, stacked in the kiln around a central flue and fired for days with the temperature judged by eye and by test pieces pulled from a port in the side. A big firing holds tens of thousands of pots and a bad one loses the lot. Wasters are dumped in heaps beside the works. Some workshops export across half the empire and their stamps turn up thousands of miles away. Fuel is the limit on everything, so kilns sit near woodland and move when it runs out.
Sources
Nearby
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