The Arctic Lid Dig of 1987

Theres always that moment when digging when you find a damaged item and think “what might have been” this story dates back to 1987 & a dig on a site in Poole, Dorset, a small strip of land had been cleared due to the demolition of some old railway cottages to make way for a new road & entrance into a planned supermarket, on digging was found to date to around 1880 when the cottages were built, this small site proved hard digging with a mixture of ash, brick rubble & glass but produces some amazing early finds.

But by far the most exciting find from the site were 3 fragments of an unrecorded pictorial tooth paste pot lid simply marked “Arctic Tooth Paste” with none of the fragments matching to make a complete lid, during the rest of the dig no other fragments or complete lids were ever found, with the latest technology during 2012 a photo of the 2 closest matching halves were sent to a collector who used his Photoshop skills to fill in the blanks and create the image of a complete lid below, I think you will agree this would rate as one of the UK’s most desirable monochrome pictorial lids.

A few other notable finds were as below…..

• Warner’s Safe Kidney & Liver Cure, Rochester NY.
• Dorset Mitchell’s Patent Mineral Bottle.
• Rare Sepia Print Cow Pictorial Cylinder Cream. (Broken While Digging)
• Bulb Neck Dorset Mineral Codd’s, 6 & 10oz.
• Various Sizes Of Holloway’s Ointment Lids & Pots.
• Tea Kettle & Snail Ink Bottles.

The entire site was only approx 80×20 feet and took a week to dig out and would now be in the center of the road shown below, although such a small size this was bar far one of the most exciting digs I’ve ever taken part in, it was more about quality than quantity.