The Clearing: Glass and Stone

The stone wall was broken. The sides were bulging outwards, elbowed aside by tree roots snaking through the wall’s interior; where the sides had been loosened the top had slumped in on itself. In some places the wall was little more than a clitter of rocks scattered on the ground, in others it still stood, the stones used to build it now resting on one another unwillingly.

We started by dismantling what was left of the section we had to repair, the now fragile structure ready to avenge itself on feet, ankles and hands, as small, rocky avalanches suddenly toppled earthwards. This was not our first visit, we had been rebuilding failing sections of the same wall for several years, but it would be one of our last, the work was nearly finished. We dug the tree stumps from the riprap with moot-axes, shovels and steel bars, much as on those earlier visits, and as we took apart the wall we sorted the stones: the small, oddly-shaped ones destined to be in-fill piled furthest away, the building stone, geometric, tactile and sensuous, kept closer to hand, whilst the heaviest, boulder-like rocks, the ones that would make the foundations, stayed as near as possible to where they would be used. After about an hour what had once been 30 yards of dry stone wall resembled little more than the moraine of a vanished glacier.

I don’t know how long our wall, on the edge of Orley Common, near Ipplepen, in south Devon, has been part of this particular landscape, a millennium possibly – it tracks the boundary between two parishes, a reasonably reliable indicator of ancientness. Whatever its age it will have been gazed on throughout by the Iron Age fort on Denbury Hill, in the near distance and now capped by trees. Stone walls play tricks with our imaginations. We like to think of them as old, as immutable, when in fact they have a fragility, like life, and have been nursed towards longevity by the skills of generations of craftspeople making a repair here or a rebuild there; working people who disappear into the landscape and into history as we look only at the view.

From the inside of our dismantled wall had come the bottom of a broken bottle, now frosted by age, with the still easily visible maker’s mark ‘P & R Bristol’ embossed around its edge. A product of the long defunct Powell and Ricketts bottle works, which existed, in that particular incarnation, from 1856 to 1923. I imagine another waller working more than a century ago and doing the same things as us, who broke or discarded the bottle as he worked – given the dates it was almost certainly a he. I imagine him working on a warm spring day, just as we were, the faint sound of church bells from one of the nearby villages drifting across verdant fields, the tall grasses swaying prairie-like in the breeze, and the towering trees on the common shading him from the afternoon sun. I imagine him rebuilding the foundations, hefting the large, back-breaking boulders into place and digging them in, with an attractive face on the outside and a level top above, from which the newly repaired section of wall would be built.

As we worked I kept thinking of that small disc of green glass. Henry Ricketts had patented a type of bottle mould in 1821 that could also be used to emboss words and symbols. Later in the century his company merged with another to form Powell and Ricketts, which, with the purchase of new, technologically-advanced furnaces, became the most important and famous of Bristol’s glassmakers. Their bottles were finished by hand, it was the failure to modernise and buy automated machinery that led to the firm’s demise in 1923.

Bristol was well placed for glass making, with local sources of sand, limestone and lead, and, in the Powell and Ricketts era, a nearby supply of fuel from the north Somerset coalfield; the coalfield’s last pit did not close until 1973. The old glass works, in the centre of the city, sandwiched between Avon Street and the Floating Harbour – the quay sides there were known as Glass Wharf, a name now appropriated by a modern development – and not much more than a stone’s throw from Temple Meads railway station, was examined by archaeologists in 2007. The site had long been a place of glass making and they uncovered an archaeology of 18th and 19th Century manufacturing: the marks in the soil, or the foundations, of chimneys, furnaces, gas-making works, annealing chambers (which cooled the glass at a controlled speed), coal stores, warehouses and ancillary buildings, many built on top of earlier structures. Amongst their finds were the remains of glass bottles embossed with the names and locations of some of Powell and Ricketts’ customers. The list reads like a gazetteer of the south and south-west of England, the familiar place names a kind of vernacular poetry: Bristol, Banbury, Bath, Budleigh Salterton, Hereford, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Ross-on-Wye, Sidmouth, Southampton, Southsea, Truro, Weymouth, Wiveliscombe. Not just in England, the found bottles named two customers in south and west Wales, and another in Cork, in south-west Ireland.

I shall never know who my mystery waller was, or where the drink came from that had filled his broken bottle. Fair to suggest that at some time in the last 100 to 160 years he had repaired this section of wall and deliberately or not left behind a small glass memento. It is unusual and somehow comforting to be able to put a date on when somebody had previously worked on a wall you are rebuilding, and to reconstruct the smallest part of a working life, even if both are freighted with the uncertainties of speculation. My nameless waller would have recognised the techniques we used as we set about the rebuild, and he would have recognised the stone. Limestone. Old Devonian limestone, which here travels in a higgledy-piggledy band running roughly westwards from the sea at Tor Bay, until it butts up against the granite of Dartmoor, surfacing here and there, such as at Orley. The wall had been built using undressed field stone, collected at one time or another from nearby fields, the unorthodox contours of each helping to create beauty from imperfection.

The foundations take time, setting the courses above can be surprisingly fast. The stones are placed one beside the other, their sides touching their neighbours, an attractive face pointing outwards, the unseen parts reaching into the wall. Every so often a tie-stone, penetrating even deeper into the wall, goes in, to help hold the structure together. The right stone can usually be found. Your eyes seem to adjust, somehow able to spot the stone that will fit a particular gap amongst all the others in the rubble beside you. Your hands adjust too, your sense of touch enough to tell you the stone’s shape, its imperfections, whether it will sit comfortably in your wall, and what should be the face, the bottom, the top. Touch also tells you when each stone is properly set, sometimes with the aid of tiny stones known as trigs to stop any rocking. When the course is finished you add the in-fill – known as heartings in many places – each small, oddly-shaped stone placed by hand, the better to stop them shifting downwards over time. Then the next course. And the next. The edges of each stone overlapping the one below as much as possible, two inches is the usual minimum.

Step back and look. No letterboxes, gaps between the stones you could slide a letter into, no ripping seams, where the joints are not spaced widely enough apart (running joint is an alternative term). Both would be a weakness in the wall. Nothing fancy here, no coping on the top, no smoots or lunkies, the former a small hole at the wall’s base to permit the passage of small mammals, or a stream, the latter a larger opening for farm animals such as sheep or geese, which can be closed using a large stone (there are any number of regional alternatives for both; pop-hole, from the Mendips, is the only reliably south-western term for smoot I have ever come across). Everything looks and feels right. The wall is rebuilt.

On my desk as I write is another Powell and Ricketts bottle, and another place name to add to the list of the firm’s customers. This one is embossed ‘The Preston Mineral Water & Bottling Works Paignton’ on the front, and, in smaller lettering on the back ‘Powell & Ricketts Bristol’. The long-gone mineral water and bottling works not many miles away from where we had been working. Memory is unreliable but I think this bottle came from a bank at the top of my childhood back garden, then little more than a generation away from being fields. This one is intact, the marble-like stopper still rattling around in the bottle’s neck. A Codd bottle. Named after the Victorian Hiram Codd, who solved the problem of storing fizzy drinks by inserting a stopper, which would be forced upwards by pressure, sealing the bottle. A plunger would be used to push the stopper down, although bottles were often broken to get at the drink inside. Because children were also in the habit of breaking Codd bottles, in order to retrieve the marble, they are surprisingly scarce. I had half forgotten this bottle, hidden away and gathering dust at the back of a shelf at home.

The bottle is translucent, the glass green and frosted by age, just like the fragment I recovered from inside the wall. It is heavier than you expect when you lift it, pleasingly so. And there is a tactility about it as you run your fingers over the glass, feeling the shape, the cool smoothness of its surface, the embossed letters that feel like embedded grit or minerals to the touch, the occasional concavities, in this case different-sized grooves moulded at the bottle’s neck to hold the stopper in place. The bottle in my hand feels uncannily like stone, and is fragile too, like a wall.

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For information about the Powell and Ricketts company I have relied on the paper: Richard A. Gregory, David Dungworth, Chris Wild & Vix Hughes (2019): Exploring Bristol’s historic glass industry: archaeological investigation at the Soap Boilers’ and Hoopers’ glasshouses, and the Powell & Ricketts’ Bottle Works, Avon Street, Glass Wharf, Bristol, Post-Medieval Archaeology, DOI: 10.1080/00794236.2018.1515403

Originally published on The Clearing. The Clearing is an online journal published by Little Toller Books that offers writers and artists a dedicated space in which to explore and celebrate the landscapes we live in.