Catching up
Back in the office after a rather protracted Christmas break followed by a long weekend away with friends and in theory revived, with batteries recharged and able to tackle all the problems of the new year. In fact I have been so busy in the last three weeks that I have completely failed to write this diary, so it is time to catch up.
Everyone was very enthusiastic about the finds displays at the Museum before Christmas and this is a photo of the glass table - we really do have an astonishing quantity of glass working waste. It is not easy to take photographs in these rather dark conditions, but the shot gives some idea of what we were able to display.
Since my return, I have finished going through the entire assemblage, separating it into the different categories of waste, all now neatly boxed, describing every identifiable vessel, and weighing every accession. We now have over 47k of raw material, tank metal from the furnace.
This includes some massive individual chunks, one weighing 30k, but it is still a huge quantity. The picture shows the huge lump of glass being excavated. It is irregular in shape, filling a small pit and it may have flowed as molten glass from the tank furnace.
The most astonishing figure is probably that for the moils, which you will remember are the little cylinders of glass left on the blowing iron after a vessel has been removed. Every complete moil therefore represents the blowing of one vessel. We have a total weight of over 6.5k of moils and an estimated count of over 5000 fragments. Of course most of these are incomplete and many are extremely small fragments, so John and I are devising ways in which to record them in order to establish how many vessels they represent. We are also looking at the best ways in which to classify and measure them. I’ll keep you posted, but I can definitely say that the recording is going to take some time …..