The kilns are strung out in a single line along the valley. Tachikui is a settlement of potteries following the fold of the hills, with climbing kilns still standing on the slopes and a shared facility where visitors can try the wheel and painting. It is counted as one of the six old kilns, spoken of alongside Seto, Tokoname, Shigaraki, Bizen and Echizen, and the tradition here is described as running back some eight hundred years.

At Sue no Sato there is a row of kiln shops where the work of the potteries scattered through the settlement can be compared in one place, which saves a good deal of walking if you are trying to buy rather than to look. Sanda is about thirty minutes away by car and Osaka roughly an hour. Premises with a kiln attached do come up for sale, so there is room for new makers to arrive, and some have. The reason everything follows the valley is that a climbing kiln needs a slope, firewood and clay need to be close, and the direction of the draught matters — and the ground meeting all of those conditions at once happened to be long and narrow.

The older the producing district, the simpler the reason it is where it is. Places where clay, firewood, a workable gradient and water occur together are not common, so kilns survived in the valleys that had all four and quietly disappeared from the ones that did not. Eight hundred years of continuity is a claim about the ground as much as about the craft, and it is worth reading it that way. It means the conditions never changed enough to make leaving worthwhile, in eight centuries, for anybody.