In 1983 workmen altering a cottage in Maltings Yard, off the Green behind the Fox and Hounds at Exton, found an intact stoneware jar standing upright just below the middle of the inglenook fireplace. It was sealed and sloshed when shaken. On the neck was the bearded face that gives such Rhenish jars their name, bartmann or bellarmine. The owner, Squadron Leader B. A. Watt, reported it to Rutland County Museum instead of pouring it out, which is what usually destroys the evidence.
The contents were studied in 1984 at Leicester University and Leicester Polytechnic, and again around 2004 at Loughborough University and the British Geological Survey. There were no pins or nails, the usual extras in a witch bottle, but 840 ml of liquid proved to be decayed horse urine, and the grey solid was mostly horse fat. Dating of the jar puts it in the third quarter of the seventeenth century.
The authors, Alan Massey and T. H. McK. Clough, argue that it is still a witch bottle, a protective deposit hidden at the hearth because the chimney was thought to be a way in for witches or evil. The horse content suggests the owner had stock to protect, perhaps against glanders or a run of deaths among his animals. They are open that this is inference: nobody wrote down why it was buried.
The jar's whereabouts are given as unknown, as the cottage has changed hands several times since 1984. The record is a documented archaeological find of apparent folk magic, not a legend, and the surviving evidence is the published analysis in Rutland Record 35.
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