NHER 8388 (Monument record) - 'Pothills field' medieval pottery works

Parish aquired name by AD 1182, being previously call previously Echam or Hecham (S1).
'Pothills Field' - mounds of ashes and potsherds. (S2) called the area Roman, there is a quote from (S2) in secondary file.
NNAS 1928 - vicar said that an old inhabitant remembered mounds (S3).
R. R. Clarke (NCM).

1953 'Pot Hills' north of Decoy Road on boundary with Catfield. Site of medieval pottery kilns. Low mound of black soil - seen littered with fragments of 12th to 15th century pottery, 13th to 14th according to J. G. Hurst.
Pits to East from which clay was probably derived. [1] [2]
R. R. Clarke (NCM). (S4).

Caution - an article in Bolingbroke Collection confuses this with lepers chapel site near Wayford Bridge.
E. Rose (NAU).

27 March 1980. Fieldwalking.
Collected from surface of field:
Red and grey medieval sherds.
A. Rogerson (NAU) and Gillian Crawley.
The finds recovered are in the Norwich Castle Museum (NWHCM : 1998.45) and are listed as comprising prehistoric worked flints, medieval pottery and kiln debris and at least one post-medieval clay tobacco pipe.
A. Rogerson (NAU), 28 March 1980. Amended by P. Watkins (HES), 29 April 2019.

A pottery sherd from this site was included in a petrographic study of late medieval and transitional (LMT) pottery from known and suspected kiln sites in Norfolk and Suffolk (Sample 3). Material was also examined from known or assumed production sites at Norwich (Mountergate, NHER 67512), Great and Little Plumstead (NHER 64833), Woodbastwick (NHER 1076) and Hopton (Suffolk), along with comparative sherds from ‘consumer’ sites at Norwich (Muspole Street, NHER 50560) and South Walsham (Suffolk). The sherds from the known and suspected production sites all have a closely related petrographic fabric. Those from the 'consumer sites' also had a comparable composition to the general petrological fabric represent by the kiln sites. This may simply reflects the homogeneous bedrock and superficial geology of this wide area, although it may indicate some degree of regional organisation to LMT production.
See report (S5) for further details.
P. Watkins (HES), 14 October 2024.