# Where to Find Natural Clay (And How to Know It Is Clay) URL: https://myclay.online/blog/where-to-find-natural-clay Published: 2026-08-10 Category: Wild clay Tags: Wild clay, Materials, Beginners Reading time: 5 min > Look at exposed vertical faces — riverbanks, cuttings, drainage ditches, foundation digs. Clay is smooth, sticky when wet and holds a shape. Test it with the ribbon test and the coil-bend test before you carry a bucket home. Clay is not rare. It is one of the most common materials on the surface of the planet — the fine end product of rock weathering, washed downhill and deposited wherever water slowed down. Most places have some. > **From the studio:** The first clay I ever dug came out of a ditch two hundred metres from my house, and I had walked past it for years. It was a bright orange band under about forty centimetres of ordinary soil, and it wrapped round my finger on the first try. Once you have seen one band, you start seeing them everywhere. The trick is knowing where it becomes visible, and how to confirm what you are looking at. ## Look for exposed vertical faces Clay is almost always buried under topsoil. What you want is somewhere the ground has been cut open so you can see the layers. - **Riverbanks and stream beds.** The classic source. Look at the outside of bends and at the base of eroding banks, below the loose topsoil, where a smooth grey, blue, orange or cream band appears. Undercut banks and the bottom of the cut are best. - **Road and railway cuttings.** Anywhere a route has been carved through a hill. Distinct horizontal bands are visible from a distance, and clay bands look smoother and more uniform than the soil above. - **Drainage ditches and field drains.** Cheap and easy to inspect, and often already partly weathered. - **Building excavations.** Foundation digs and trenches produce heaps of subsoil. Many builders are pleased to have some taken away — ask. - **Ponds and puddles that hold water.** Water sitting for days after rain in a field is a strong clue that the layer underneath is clay, since clay is nearly impermeable. - **Landslips and eroded slopes.** Nature does the digging. ## Two field tests **The ribbon test.** Wet a lump and roll it into a coil about the thickness of a pencil. Wrap it round your finger. - Cracks and falls apart immediately → too much sand or silt. Not usable as it is. - Bends most of the way with a few cracks → workable, probably needs cleaning. - Wraps fully with no cracks → genuinely plastic clay. Take it home. **The feel test.** Rub a wet pinch between finger and thumb. Clay is smooth and faintly greasy, with no grit at all. Silt feels floury when dry and slightly gritty when wet. Sand is unmistakably gritty. A third clue: dry clay is hard, cracks into blocks with straight edges, and rings faintly when two pieces are tapped together. ## What the colour tells you Colour comes from the metal content and predicts something about the firing. - **Red, orange, brown** — high iron. Fires red or brown, usually at low temperature, and often melts if pushed above about 1100 °C. - **Grey and blue** — iron in a reduced form, common in waterlogged deposits. Often fires buff or light brown, and frequently smells of sulphur when dug. - **White and cream** — low iron, potentially higher-firing. The rarest to find and the most useful when you do. - **Black** — organic matter. Burns out in the firing, usually leaving a much lighter colour, and can cause bloating if the piece is fired too fast. Colour when wet is not colour when fired. A vivid orange clay may fire to a modest buff, and only a test tile tells you. ## Digging responsibly **Ask before you dig.** On your own land you are free to do as you please. Public land, nature reserves, protected sites and riverbanks are usually restricted, sometimes strictly, and river banks in particular are often protected against erosion for good reason. Dig from an already exposed face rather than opening new holes. Take modest amounts. Fill in and reinstate anything you disturb. A bucket of clay is enough for several pots and weighs a great deal more than you expect after a kilometre. ## Before you use it Wild clay always arrives contaminated with sand, gravel, roots and organic matter. The processing sequence is: [slake](/blog/how-to-process-wild-clay) it down in water, sieve out the coarse material, let the fines settle, pour off the water, and dry the resulting slurry back to a workable stiffness on a plaster bat. Then [test fire](/blog/firing-clay-without-a-kiln) it, starting low. Most wild clay is low-fire, and pushing an unknown body to stoneware temperature is how you find out what melted clay does to a kiln shelf. Fire a small test tile at cone 06 first, then higher if it survives, and note where it stops absorbing water and where it starts to slump. ## What to take with you A short list, learned mostly by not having any of it. **A trowel or a small spade.** A trowel is enough for a test sample; a spade if you are actually harvesting. **A bucket with a lid**, and lower expectations about how much you can carry than you think. Wet clay is roughly twice the weight of the same volume of water in feel, and a full bucket up a riverbank is a serious carry. **A bottle of water**, for the ribbon test on the spot. There is no point taking home a bucket of silt. **Zip bags and a marker**, for small samples from several spots. Label them with the location and depth, because after three sites they all look identical and the differences only appear once fired. **A phone photo of the face** you dug from, showing the layers. Useful when you return, and useful for working out later why one sample behaved differently. Test before you carry. Two minutes with a wet pinch of clay and one coil round your finger saves an hour of hauling material that was never going to work. ## Where to go next Digging it is the easy part — [how to process wild clay](/blog/how-to-process-wild-clay) covers turning it into something workable. If your garden is the likeliest source, [how to make clay from soil](/blog/how-to-make-clay-from-soil) is the shorter version. And [what does clay look like](/blog/what-does-clay-look-like) helps you identify it before you carry a bucket home. ## Frequently asked questions **How do you know if soil is clay?** Wet a pinch and rub it between your fingers. Clay feels smooth and slightly greasy with no grittiness, holds together, and can be rolled into a thread thin enough to wrap around your finger without breaking. **Is it legal to dig clay?** On your own land, generally yes. On public land, in nature reserves and on someone else's property, usually not without permission. Ask the landowner, and check local rules before digging on protected sites or riverbanks. **Can you use clay straight from the ground?** Rarely. Wild clay comes with sand, gravel, roots and organic matter that need removing, and its firing range is unknown until you test it. Expect to slake, sieve, dry and test fire before use. --- Source: https://myclay.online/blog/where-to-find-natural-clay — https://myclay.online/