Mudlarking

I wanted to go mudlarking on my birthday. I began getting friends and family lined up and planning where we might go for lunch afterwards. 

I don't have a licence to go poking about on the Thames foreshore so I rang up to make a booking with the excellent Thames Explorer Trust. 

However, the helpful person at Thames Explorer, patiently explained that if we wanted to do this on my birthday we would have to get to the river very early indeed.

Because of the tides.

Durrr. I was Cornish and yet I'd forgotten about tides. 

So the upshot was that Carol loyally still wanted to go and we went the weekend before my birthday when the tides were perfect and the sun shone. 

Because London had been so intensely occupied for so long, everyone in our group found lots of objects. One person found the top of a Tudor money box, another a section of Tudor candlestick. 

My own favourite finds were two fragments of a Bellarmine jar, made in the Low Countries and bearing the likeness of bearded cardinal Bellarmine. 

Everybody found a mass of clay pipe stems,  and one person found a pipe bowl from the very earliest days of tobacco consumption in the country.

We took photos and then we were encouraged to leave it all behind on the river shore.

For the tide to take again.