The story begins at the Blackwater river near Rhinefield in the New Forest - it's a typical new Forest stream - water stained tea-brown with tannins from woodland leaves and peaty heaths, a bed of shingle and coarse pebbles over clay, steep banks of mixed soils and clays - bridged occasionally by fallen trees, a mix of deep pools, meanders, straight runs and broad, shallow natural fords.

In places, the material of the river bank is very conspicuously clay - and it's this that is of interest to me today. In order to avoid causing damage by digging into the sides, I chose a place where the bank had collapsed naturally, exposing a tumble of big blocks of semi-dried blue clay.

And it's that chunk of clay on the lower left that I collected - well - a few pieces of it.

I collected about a kilo of clay pieces in an old ice cream container - as you can see though, there's a bit of contamination by ordinary soil and plant material.

The proper way to do this would be to dry the clay pieces thoroughly, bash them to dust, then sieve them through a very fine mesh, before mixing the dust with water to make usable clay again.

That's a lot of trouble for a very small amount of clay - so I'm cutting corners - I broke about half of my clay into little pieces in a different container

Next, I covered them with water for half an hour. then poured off the water and left the moistened clay to sit for a while - the water continues to even out through the clay pieces.

After that, I pounded and mashed the clay together with the end of a scrap of wood.

The texture of this material is incredibly fine - and there's no smell at all - indicating (I think) that it's pure clay with no residues of organic matter

The processed clay turned out to be a little on the wet, sticky side - so I formed it into rough cylinder shapes and stacked them to allow air flow - I'm going to allow these to dry out very slowly in a large container with the lid kept slightly ajar.

The clay looks coarse and sandy in this picture, but it's not - that texture appeared as a result of rolling it in my hands while it was so sticky and wet.