Ivory Pawn

Discovered a few hours ago, underneath a bridge over a river two miles from my house:

This ivory Victorian chess piece. That particular bridge was notorious in my book for housing an old dump underneath it, in a little passageway just off from the river's edge. The ground there is littered with broken glass, china, shotgun shells and metal rusted beyond recognition, and in the past I'd found a small number of intact bottles and pretty shards of teacup shards, so I make an effort to go back there every so often.

When the river's high it washes through this passageway and exposes more findings - at my visit the river was exceptionally low, due to the dry weather, and rather stagnant. There were very poor pickings - tens of broken bottles, Victorian and Edwardian era medicine and lemonade vessels, exactly what I was desperate to find, intact that is... just a load of necks and sides and bottoms scattered about, some of which I could match up, incomplete, so sad. Just rubbish back then... probably still rubbish now...

Pictured are these two shards, one of which interested me because it had a crown on it, and the other was just nice colours, and what I thought was a plastic modern chess piece (I almost left it there!). Upon getting home mum informed me that it was bone or ivory, and after cleaning it up I could see on the underside that the pillar had been slotted into a round hole into the base, whereas a modern piece would have been cast in a mould. Certainly one of the quaintest little things I've discovered...

The letters on the china shard read 'oseaawn', as far as I can tell. The letter before the O may be a capital R... I'm about to Google it...