The weather was too good to miss the opportunity after work, so I continued some excavations around the location of the fountain, the centre piece of the lawn in the nineteenth century. Of course I had to find the location first, but recent geophys scans gave some insights so off I went!
Everywhere you put a spade in the ground there is some kind of obstruction, first a brick wall, definitely Victorian, then some old clay tiles in the form of an inverted U sitting on thin pieces of stone paving. [More on this later on the history site, as I think it is very early, possibly from the house which stood here in the sixteenth century.] There are two lines of these drains, and they definitely pre-date the Victorian brickwork as they had been stopped off where they coincided with the outside of the wall. To think this started off as a new location for our strawberries! I hadn’t reckoned on the remaining structures being so near the surface.
After the initial discoveries which were interesting enough, the next thing to turn up was a 1945 florin (Two Shilling Piece), then a circular metal tag or disc marked NFFI on one side and the numeral 6 on the other, with a hole for looping a chord through! But the pièce de résistance was the small porcelain figurine, legs only! Probably part of a tureen lid.
The feet are very delicate and it seems that to preserve modesty the Cherub, for that is surely what it is, has a sash, partly in gold leaf, around the waist and covering the groin! I wonder how this piece of fine porcelain came to its end in the fountain, or nearby?