180 WITH REMARKS UPON THE OBJECTS FOUND.
would be made in a very primitive manner. In Janvier's
Practical Keramics it is stated that in England a kiln is "generally
a low, vaulted chamber, with a cone-shaped stack. In very
rough pottery baking there is no regular kiln at all, the pots
themselves being piled up on a sort of floor, and arranged to let
the flames play over and through them." It is possible that
rude kilns might have been made by piling up the pans
surrounded by faggots, and covering in the whole with clay, in
the fashion of charcoal-burning, but with a kind of flue at top
to allow of the requisite high temperature being attained. To
prevent the pots collapsing it is suggested that the T-pieces, the
upright with the foot (Fig. 2, E), and the double prong (Fig. 4)
were joined with a lump of clay in the middle, as shown in Fig.
5. We took this idea from the explanations of our old friend
the potter at Waltham Abbey (see above), who was well
acquainted with the primitive methods employed in his young
days; but this suggestion is a purely tenative one, and may De
confuted by the results of further explorations. When the
firing was finished, the demolishment of these primitive kilns
would set free great quantities of more or less perfectly
burnt "red-earth."
If these vessels were really the objective of the pottery-
making, to what use were the pots or pans—some of them
nearly two feet in diameter—put by the workers at the Red-hills?
One recalls the late Rev. J. C. Atkinson's paper, "Some
further notes on the Salting Mounds of Essex,"4 in which he
suggests that the Red-hills were ancient Salinae or salt-pans. He
gives a very considerable amount of indirect evidence in favour
of this supposition, and the paper is well worthy of careful
study in connection with the problem. Our President, Mr.
Miller Christy, F.L.S., in his paper on "The History of Salt-
making in Essex," read before the Club on April 7th, 1906, but
not yet published, pointed out how numerous were these "salt-
cotes" on the shores of our Essex estuaries and inlets in the time
of the Domesday Survey.5 The sites of the salt-pans plotted on
the map exhibited by Mr. Christy were roughly coincident with
many of the existing Red-hills, and the seeker for a raison d'etre
4 Archaeological Journal, Vol. xxxvii. (1880), p. 196.
5 See also Mr. Horace Round's Essay on the Survey in the Victoria History. He says
that '"the distribution of the salt-pans was in Essex extremely local, being virtually
restricted to the Hundreds of Tendring, Winstree, and Thurstable in the N.E. of the
county."