Those of you who visit regularly down the years will know that I'm a bit of an addict for the car boot sales on a weekend. Often I walk round and find nothing that takes my fancy, but last Sunday was the day I found an absolute gem. It cost a tad more than £1.... but not a lot, and is one of the rarest bits of pottery I think I've ever found.

This little transfer printed milk jug celebrates the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway on 15th September 1830 and depicts the mighty Moorish Arch tunnel portal on one side and a very quaint depiction of one of those first trains full of little folks on the other side. Obviously the event pretty well dates the jug to 1830 or very shortly after & it would appear that it may have been made at the Herculaneum Pottery in Liverpool, although it bears no marks. A tiny bit of damage to the rim & some slight staining, but it is almost 200 years old!

Found for Pound will return shortly with a few unusual summer finds...

One of our nearby Herefordshire woods that I've been visiting for 25 years contains a truly weird and remarkable phenomenon on one of the ash trees. Burrs are not particularly common on straight growing woodland ash trees but a good bit more than 25 years ago something caused this tree to produce this strange 'ash-beast' that emanates from the trunk. Slowly, slowly it gets a little bigger each year, gathering more moss and ferns as it grows. My only hope is that nothing untoward happens to the tree, either natural disaster or some bright spark deciding to fell it. I have a suspicion that any forester with his wits about him might just be a little wary of causing such a tree any harm.

Thought you might like to see this latest addition to my archive image collection. This is a late Victorian hand-coloured lantern slide made and sold by W.C.Hughes of London and I would date it to around 1890 judging by the clothing. Clearly it is a somewhat staged affair, but charming for all that, and the colouring is rather fine too - a bit splodgy when viewed with a lens, yet the overall effect is very pleasing and must have looked impressive when projected on to a large screen as originally intended. The quality of the image is very reminscent of the autochromes, perfected by the Lumiere Brothers in the very early 20th century.

Victorian middle class society must have thought working life in the woods was so idyllic, more a genteel pastime with accompanying picnic rather than plain hard graft day in day out, come rain or shine.

Up in the Welsh hills on Saturday to revisit a couple of ancient ash trees that I hadn't seen for about five years and quite startled to find that this particular one has undergone a bit of self-pollarding in the windy weather only a week or so back. The poor old thing has split asunder, dropping about a third of itself, which is very sad when we have relatively few seriously old/large ash trees. Of course the reason this happened is largely due to the cessation of pollarding a long time ago - I'm guessing that nobody had touched the tree for at least 50 years and almost certainly a lot longer. The boughs had just grown bigger and longer, slowly putting greater and greater leverage on the hollow bole, until it all became too much. If we want to keep such trees with us a little longer it means that repollarding or perhaps crown reduction is the answer, but on such old trees it needs to be done with much care - perhaps in two or three phases so that the tree is not traumatised. Truth to tell with this one is that it is so remote that few people would know of its existance and even then nobody really gave its management much thought.