Since the rocks I collected from the Don Valley Brickworks were all mud-covered I really only had a very rough idea of what I had collected on my trip. So, with some toothbrushes in hand, my children and I began to clean these little treasures.
Some of the rocks really don’t have any merit as pigment, and I knew as much even before taking the caked dirt off them. For example, a piece of slag was to me a little piece of history that I couldn’t leave behind. Another rock surprisingly turned out to be a sample that doesn’t come from that area at all, but must have been dragged there by glacial ice many thousands of years ago. At the end of cleaning, the best pigment rock I collected is probably the yellow limestone sample I mentioned in an earlier entry.
All these samples come from the bottom of the hill, and in reading about the history of this location I know that there were two strata dug from the site, one on top of the other. So I will still be revisiting the site to see what might be collected from the top …