Due to abundant well-drained clay all along the valley ridge, tile and brick making is documented here as far back as the late 1600s. Rhead's book "Staffordshire Pots and Potters" (1906) found only a one-man water-pipe business in Basford at 1818, but noted traces of a possible early pottery: "... there were scattered foundations of what might have been a pottery in King's fields, with the remains of low arches as of oven or kiln 'mouths'." During the 1830s, the area along the base of the escarpment featured the full range of brick and tile yards and small ceramics manufactories, increasingly working at an industrial scale. Despite this, substantial pockets of fields and woods persisted, notably the Etruria Woods. As late as 1929 aerial photography reveals large fields of corn and wheat being harvested directly alongside large tile-works at Basford.