As the title suggests, after an evening spent with my son and his friend playing football by the beach, we began to make our way home, passing through some public gardens I frequented as a child.

I remember many happy hours spent finding bits of willow pattern china, feeling nostalgic I decided to see if I could still find any.....

Amazingly, I did, after 29 years I found a piece, seemingly not quite so plentiful nowadays (one piece was all I could find), nevertheless, I still found it just as fulfillng as I did when I was small.

But one question for me remains unanswered, and has always baffled me ......

Why is there fragments of willow pattern china in the soil ?

I'm sure this is a really easy question to answer, and someone out there will probably quench my curiosity very quickly, in fact it is probably more baffling why I don't know the answer !

Over the years I have seen these fragments in the soil of arious locations around the UK, so perhaps it is deliberately added ?

Anyway,someone please put me out of my misery.

Not Knowing your location, (don't tell me) I do know that rubbish was often buried, broken china was just/is useless rubbish. You could probably find out in your locale what those public gardens used to be at some other time. Even in my garden I have dug up pottery and china, and medicine bottles all related to the last, possibly two centuries.

So working on that premise, are the fragments found where they broke, or is it just shipped in amongst soil that is laid down ?

It is a funny old thing, I have images of great swathes of people smashing plates, having a good old "smash fest"

I'd like to see some pictures of this pattern as I have no idea what you're talking about.

People used to throw broken pottery and glass down the outhouse hole. There was no rubbish collection in those days and you either burned your trash or threw it down the already dug and handy hole. Those outhouse areas have turned into nice fertile soil over the years. Add in the amount of uprising and mixing plowing an area will give you, and...