Thank you for your comments!
Let me start with a statement: this is NOT Caithness, neither before nor after they took Whitefriars over. After all - I am managing the paperweight section of
ScotlandsGlass, with the
Caithness catalogue being the largest project: images of more than 4'000 Caithness paperweights are in my archive (not all online yet) - this weight is not one of them, and they never made anything only close to it.
Let's forget Wedgwood - just mentioned as "maker" in the header, but not in the description itself.
It is well known (though sad) that even prestigious auction houses have been fooled by items packed in the wrong boxes. I have also experienced several occasions when people working at auction houses were considered (by others or themselves) as paperweight experts, only because they worked at an auction house (though didn't have a clue about paperweights) - so one has to be careful with their "expertise".
Webb Corbett has been doing several flash overlays with engraved bases (Queen Victoria, spiders, dragonflies, and seahorses come to my mind) - often marked. I have seen quite a few identically looking, unmarked paperweights. Not being a Webb Corbett specialist, I don't know if they also sold their weights unmarked - or whether these unmarked weights are copies (to avoid the word fakes). Similar (at first sight) weights have come from Murano - but not with the base engraved; instead some sort of transfer/decal printing (not sure about the correct English word for images applied to the surface, not inside the weight) was used.
So this weight is definitely not "Caithness/Whitefriars" - and we seem to agree it's not "original Whitefriars" either. Instead it is either a genuine (though not signed) Webb Corbett - or just an imitation.
Further comments are welcome.