Boyton Dock

A walk around Boyton along the tidal banks of the Butley River and the  River Ore. We saw redshanks, an egret and a merlin - too distant and fast moving to photograph.

Boyton Dock is a reminder of two short-lived booms, when geology created brief windfalls for the nearby village of Boyton. A large deposit of high quality potter's clay was found in the mid-1600's beneath a local field. It was good enough for export to Holland and America, and also for shipping to the London delftware manufacturers at Lambeth and Vauxhall. At its height, the boom saw 500 tons of clay dug every year, carted to the dock and sent to London. That bubble burst when they ran out of clay.

The other Boyton boom also came from beneath the sandy crag soils, where brown nodules of phosphate - coprolite - were found that make good agricultural fertiliser. The boom began in the 1840's, but it was all over by 1880. In a seven-year period, 1,600 tons of coprolites were quarried from one Boyton farm, and 2,500 tons from another. The nodules were shipped from the dock on the Butley River by barge. At Ipswich they were ground up and processed into fertiliser.

The village sign illustrates the local history.