GROWING IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF COLCHESTER. 35
within a year or two somewhere near by, where it had not previously
been found. I therefore propose to keep back the list I have
prepared for the present, in the hope that the exertions of our
botanical members, and my own work, will considerably reduce it
during the next few summers.
I have prepared a manuscript book, in which is noted the informa-
tion I possess connected with the flora of the Colchester district; this
book will at all times be at the service of the Club. The records
clearly show that many plants recorded by Gibson's co-workers as
occurring in one or two localities only, are in reality widely distributed.
I must not end these notes without thanking those botanists,
whose names I have mentioned above, for the great assistance they
have so freely given to me.
Early British Urns near Nayland, Suffolk, and Wix, Essex.—On the
Suffolk bank of the Stour, west of Nayland Church, at one point touching the
river, is a narrow strip of river-gravel skirting a slight hill which rises from the
river. On this river-gravel, and within a stone's throw of Essex, they are making
a new cemetery and building a vicarage ; during the operations, a portion of a
hand-made and extremely rude urn was unearthed from a depth of about two feet.
The fragment, nearly half the vessel, is about a foot in diameter and 15 inches
high. The urn is formed of half-baked clay with the usual admixture of small
stones, and from age and ill-firing crumbles at a touch. The outside is covered,
to within two inches from the bottom, with indentations made with the tip of the
potter's fingers, arranged in spirals round the urn, so as to form a rude but
effective kind of ornamentation ; it contained remains of bones. There was also
found in the same ground a portion of another urn of the same character, with
finger and nail marks even more distinctly shown, but not apparently arranged to
form any pattern. Near by, another urn about the size of a breakfast cup, of the
character usually described by antiquaries as a drinking cup, was unearthed, but
this was quite plain without any attempt at ornamentation. By the kindness of
the Rev. J D. Gray, Vicar of Nayland, these interesting relics of the earlier
races of Britain have been placed in the Museum of the Essex Archaeological
Society, in Colchester Castle, and will help materially to illustrate a period, of
which few remains occur, in this otherwise rich museum.
The Rev. Canon Marsden, Rector of Great Oakley, informs me, that thirty years
ago some fragments of another urn, forming about the upper half of a similar vase
were found on the dairy farm in the parish of Wix, a village on the Essex side of
the Stour, east of Nayland. This urn has been put together by cement, and shows
that, probably, it and the Nayland urns were of a very unusual type. Instead of
the mouth being contracted and having an overhanging rim, they both probably
gradually swelled out to the upper margin. The ornamentation of this Wix vase
consists of four imitation handles pinched up by the fingers, the marks being left.
There are also indentations round the rim produced by the fingers, and a single
row of impressions of the finger tips round the urn just below the handles. The
surface also is irregularly marked, apparently by the points of a comb, which
was about an inch in length, and had eight teeth. The Museum has also acquired
this urn by the kindness of the Rev. Canon Marsden. The dimensions, nearly
sixteen inches in diameter, of the Wix urn, and the twelve inches of the Nayland
fragment, show them both, in size as well as form, to belong to a very unusual
type of Celtic pottery, in fact, probably unique.—HENRY Laver, M.R.C.S.,
F.L.S., Colchester, January, 1887.