What larks!

I've Blipped before about the joys of mudlarking down on the Thames foreshore with Tom, but the excitement of finding a decorated pipe bowl or handle of a jug is always tempered by my lack of knowledge about what it is, exactly, that we're looking at.

Today we joined a guided walk along the river with a company called Clayground Collective. We had a two hour walk at low tide with Mike Webber, a ceramics expert and a walking archaeological encyclopedia on finds along the Thames.

Now this is what blows my socks off: in the first twenty minutes we found Roman floor tiles and a piece from a Roman pestle (or mortar, I'm never sure which is which). I found a beautiful fragment of Roman pot decorated with leaves and flowers. We found shards of medieval wine jugs, Tudor and Stuart glazed pottery and slipware, and masses of Georgian and Victorian delft and other crocks. Mike's 'Find of the Day' was Roman, a piece of pottery that Tom and I would have overlooked as it was dull brown, chunky, not decorated and pretty non-descript, but it turned out to be the oldest and most interesting piece today.

My personal favourite is the clay pipe-bowl I've Blipped. It was found by a girl in our group who'd nipped behind a moored barge for a pee, and found this face - a black man, the face of a slave? - staring up at her. It's a fabulous, rare find. Tom and I have been searching for years for one like this, and it was wonderful to see it, touch it and share her excitement at her found treasure.

Tom's find of the day was a decorated piece from a Bellarmine jug, or witch-bottle (so called because it was featured in a long complicated spell, involving pins and urine, to ward off witches), dating from the 17th century. You could clearly make out an eye on Tom's piece and it will be kept very carefully at home with our other mudlarking treasures. We have a few. Jamie wondered whether, in the future, people might come to our house to go mudlarking as we seem to have bought most of the foreshore home with us.

Don't worry - there's still plenty left.