The mysterious clay pits at Chitterne

Here are some ramblings collected from the web:

The clay from Chitterne probably served the numerous villages and towns scattered below Salisbury Plain, where many pipemakers were at work from at least 1630 until the rural decline of the 1750-1760 period. By 1773, Cow Down, Chitterne, had become known as Clay PIt Hill and it probably continued to serve the pipemakers of Salisbury, where James Skeaines II was still working in 1881.

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Clay Pits or Clay Pit Hill is the name of an area of Chitterne where an area of smooth white clay 250 metres across is to be found on top of the chalk. The site on Chitterne St Mary Down, close to the parish boundary with Codford, is no longer worked and the old pits are in a wood on private land.

The smooth white clay with round pebbles had been uniquely preserved in the chalk plateau by sinking into a large hole, of unknown depth, in the chalk millions of years ago. The nearest equivalent clay is to be found 14 miles to the south-west.

The clay is thought to have been known and used by man at least since neolithic times. Two flint scrapers, thought to be neolithic, have been found at the site and nearby an enclosed area and a field system have been identified from aerial photographs.

In 1651 Lord Henry Pawlett granted a licence for one year to Christopher Merewether and Edward Fripp, both of Chitterne, to dig thirty loads of clay from the clay pits on Chitterne St Mary Down to make into tobacco pipes, they having paid him £10 for the licence, and to pay him eight gross of pipes to be delivered at The Angel in Andover.

From the Chitterne St Mary burial records we find buried on 2 November 1711: Thomas Morgan, a Claydigger, "killed by ye found....of ye Pit."

According to Canner, "the hill called Clay Pits is the place where the best clay in England is to be found for the manufacturing of tobacco pipes." He further says that, "in the seventeenth century it was dug and carted to Amesbury and used by the firm of Gauntlett for the above purpose."

Fuller says, "the best for shape and colour are made at Amesbury. They may be called chimneys portable in pockets the one end being the hearth, the other the tunnel thereof.

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Sunday 8th February - Ancient People at Clay Pits
From Sue Robinson
Chitterne Now and Then
Blog Archive - January 2009
http://www.suerobinson.me.uk/blog2009jan.html

The clay pits were in use much earlier than the 17th century when the white clay was used to make tobacco pipes. Two neolithic flint tools were found at the site and nearby an old field system and an enclosure have been plotted from aerial photographs, according to the Wiltshire and Swindon sites and Monument Record. I wonder what the New Stone Age people used the clay for?

I looked up "Reading Beds" and they are beds of similar clay and sand from the Eocene period of pre-history, 30 million years ago. Southern Britain was covered in tropical vegetation and frequently flooded by the sea, which laid down beds of pebbles, sands and clays. There are smooth round pebbles still mixed with the white clay at Clay Pits. It's mind-boggling to think that they have lain there for so long. In Victorian times folk collected them to decorate their gardens much as we are doing with pebbles nowadays.


Friday 6th February - Found the Blocked Sink Hole

I sent BJ the photo (below) of Clay Pits I'd taken a few years ago when I took a descendant of one of the clay diggers to look around (See Tobacco Road under Past Writings). BJ returned with a quote from Isobel Geddes who had also visited the site some years before. It seems the clay filled the sink hole some millions of years ago, and when the rest of the clay got washed away it remained behind, which neatly explains why there is this single pocket of fine pipe-clay on top of the chalk. She says:

"Claypit Hill, Chitterne. (ST 994425). This former aggregate extraction site provides a unique occurence of sands and clays (thought to be Reading Beds) on the chalk plateau of Salisbury Plain. The strata owe their preservation by having collapsed, several m.y.(million years) ago, down into a major solution hollow in the chalk some 250m across and of unknown depth. They provide the only direct evidence of strata formerly overlying the chalk in this part of Wiltshire - the nearest Reading Beds outcrop is over 14 miles to the S.W."

So sink holes can happen in Chalk areas and they're blocked, but not by sarsens? BJ concluded by supposing that the idea of the sarsens coming from the sink hole now seems dodgy. I have no idea how you could prove something like that at the moment.

Wednesday 4th February - Chitterne Sink Hole?

A very intriguing enquiry came yesterday by email. BJ wanted to know if I had come across the Chitterne sink hole. I had never heard of such a thing. However, he had sparked my curiosity and I did some poking around on Google.

It seems that there is controversy over the way the stones at Stonehenge got there. One faction of archeologists think some were brought from Wales and another faction think they were gathered from nearby debris deposited by the movement of ice. BJ is of the second opinion and this is where the Chitterne sink hole comes in. He says: "According to Geoff Kellaway the Chitterne sink hole (one of the deepest sink holes on the downs) was the place where the Stonehenge sarsens came from, and the sides run vertically for at least 10m." Well, (ha!) I'd heard of very deep wells in the village, some over 140ft, but not a sink hole.

To be sure what we were talking about I looked up sink hole. It is a naturally formed depression in the ground usually where underground water has worn away the soft rock causing the surface to sink. Most usually in limestone areas. So can this happen in chalk areas? I don't know and I have never heard of such a thing around here. I checked my few books on Salisbury Plain archeology and neither had sink hole in the index.

My Google search on Geoff Kellaway turned up a reference to Clay Pits. Saying that clay was dug from the top of the sink hole. Hence the picture above, which shows a pond in the middle of Clay Pits. I shall endeavour to find out more.

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It's interesting that Isobel Geddes thinks that the deposits in the clay pits (white clay, rounded pebbles etc) are derived from the Reading Beds.  Geoff Kellaway thought there might have been sarsens in the pits as well, in the upper part of this very large solution hollow or sink hole.  But as I discussed with Sue Robinson, I'm not very convinced about that.

Chris Green, in his 1997 article (p 261),  refers to the sediments in the solution pipe as Middle Eocene Reading Beds, and says they are related to the "composition and sedimentology" of a Middle Eocene outlier on Cley Hill near Warminster.  he also suggests that the deposits of the Reading Beds once covered the whole of the chalk downs.

The more I look, the more I seem to find in the way of clues relating to "drift deposits" scattered across western Wiltshire -- and only some of these seem to be related to the Clay with Flints which we have discussed at length on this blog.  The truth of the matter is that because of the ubiquitous presence of the army on the chalk downs, serious geomorphology has been very limited.  Attention has almost always been concentrated on the archaeological remains.  Who knows what's out there, and how important it might be?