Doug Fitch
In 2004 he achieved his lifelong dream and established Hollyford Pottery, deep in the Mid-Devon countryside, as a fully operational workshop with a large kiln fuelled with wood.
As a schoolboy he had excavated a medieval kiln site at Lyveden in Northants with the school archaeological society. The excavation had revealed hundreds of medieval shards and he remembers the excitement of handling these pieces that had been abandoned in the soil for centuries. He returned to the site as a student, now a ploughed field, to walk the furrows and amassed box-full after box-full of treacly lead-glazed shards that dictated the direction of his work.
He certainly one of the top slipware potters in the country today.
