Reader, when you hear the word ‘pottery’, what do you think of? A tasteful piece of Clarice Cliffe on the Antiques Roadshow? An archaeologist telling us how Grooved Ware has overturned all our ideas about the Neolithic in Britain? Well, I think of rats.

Long ago, when my son was young, we kept guinea pigs. In summer, they had a run on the lawn, but in winter they lived in the garden shed, well supplied with hay and guinea pig food. After a while I noticed that the bottom of the shed door had been gnawed until there was a hole there. There were clear tooth marks. Rats! A common pest in suburbia, where people feed the birds and aren’t always careful about what they put on the compost heap. Of course it was only to be expected that they would enjoy guinea pig food, which is mostly grain. I wasn’t surprised by their efforts on the wooden door, but I was impressed by their determined work on the lid of the plastic bin where we stored the food. Did they actually swallow shavings of red plastic and did it really do them no harm? This incident got me thinking about pottery. They couldn’t have knawed through that. If I had stored my grain in a thick-walled ceramic bucket with a stone lid on top the rats wouldn’t have stood a chance.

And that got me thinking about how easy it is to make pottery, if you are not too particular about what it looks like, or its fire-resistant and water-retaining properties.  Although you can improve a leaky piece of ceramic by burning a bit of milk inside it.

I was once employed by a local authority which was having a family day in a country park. At that time I was known to be working on medieval pottery at a museum nearby and they wanted me to run an activity making pots. They supplied a shed and a pile of timber offcuts and I sourced the clay. The families spent the morning kneading this clay and mixing in various tempering materials such as sand and crushed shell and chaff, which I obtained from the local pet shop. They made pinch pots and in the afternoon we put the pots into a haphazard heap of wood and set light to it. As the activity only covered one day we didn’t even have time to dry the pots first, which is normally regarded as vital. If you don’t dry them out thoroughly the pots have a tendency to explode when tiny pockets of water reach boiling point.

The wonder of it was that after only a few hours in that inadequate bonfire some of the pots had actually fired (some had only fired in parts). Clay has to be heated to a temperature of at least 500 degrees C to make the irreversible change to ceramic, albeit rather grotty ceramic. If we had had twice as much wood and twice as much time I think our pots would all have fired into real ceramic vessels. They probably wouldn’t have been suitable for boiling porridge over a fire, but they would have kept the rats out.

And what do you do in areas without trees, like the Northern and Western Isles? Well, if you don't have wood for the firing you can use peat. Derek Hall in " The Scottish Medieval Pottery Industry: a pilot study" (Tay & Fife Archaeological Committee 2016) considered that peat was a perfectly likely fuel for medieval pottery kilns in Scotland. According to a Wikipedia entry, peat was used to fire pottery kilns in the Netherlands, which was another area without trees. For example, the potteries established at Gouda in the 18^th century used peat as fuel.

And you really don’t need an elaborate kiln. My crude bonfire has historical parallels. In the Hebrides, 19^th century housewives made a type of pottery called ‘craggan’ or ‘crogan’ ware in the cooking hearths of their crofts. They used local clay, tempered simply by leaving in the sand and fine gravel which it contained naturally, and only removing larger stones. The pots were handmade, coil-built, sometimes with simple impressed decoration, and left to dry for twenty-four hours. Incidentally, you don’t need sun to dry them either: a craft potter in the Orkney island of Westray told me that he found a strong wind dried his products quite adequately. Then the craggans were fired in the ordinary cooking hearth in the centre of the farmhouse, with burning peats put inside and around them. When they had been fired for long enough to turn them into ceramic, milk was poured over them inside and out to seal the porous surfaces. They were usually used for liquids (beer, water, buttermilk and so on) and had a neck over which a piece of sheepskin could be tied as a lid.

From the mid-19C until the 1930s, at the small village of Barvas on Lewis in the Hebrides, a peculiar ware was made by the same process but copying the forms of the factory-made china tea sets which were starting to appear in Scotland. It was known as Barvas ware. It may have been made largely for tourists.

Pottery can be an exquisite and subtle art form, requiring great skill and technical knowledge to reach perfection. From Chinese porcelain and Japanese tea bowls to Wedgewood and Bernard Leach, it rightly fills our museums and art galleries today. But remember that if you just want to keep out rats, it’s  fairly simple to make.