Mudlarking & Bottle Digging Hats

Mudlarking is the hobby of searching a river foreshore at low tide for whatever the water has left behind, and on the Thames the finds run to clay pipe stems and pottery shards, the most commonly found objects of all. Permits are in such demand that a 10,000-person waitlist has been reported, and the foreshore itself is private property that changes hands with the tide. Bottle digging is its landlocked cousin: probe a likely patch with a four-to-six-foot spring steel rod, feel for ash and the crunch of man-made debris, and you may have found a privy pit that sat untouched for a century. One digger calls it the ultimate high, touching something no one has touched in 150 to 175 years. Vaults run from under two feet to over 25 feet deep, and the forum rallying cry is let no hole go undug. Both pursuits are amateur archaeology told as a cold-case investigation, and both are proud of digging up old rubbish. These hats are for the mudlarks with a bag of pipe stems, the bottle diggers with muddy knees, and anyone who thinks old trash beats new trash. Each design is custom embroidered on a dad hat, from the plain MUDLARK and BOTTLE DIGGER badges to the toilet bottle brag.