We arrived at permission 'BH' for the third instalment of surveys at this brand new farm.
There are three staters hidden in this picture . You may have to enlarge it to cheat :) A link to the bigger picture can be seen here.
The field to the left is the one where the 6 hammered were recovered last week. The field in front of the trees belongs to another landowner and this may have an unofficial market site there as trade weights and early hammered coinage have been recovered here.
Anyway, we began the survey with the Deus' set up with the large coils and GMP mode in standard. Rob had GB set on 'Tracking' whilst I set it to 'Manual'.
The only diffrence is that I tried the 5 Tone setting. This was really weird compared to the 3 Tone I'm used to. I alternated between the 3 & 5 tone settings.
The first artifact to be recovered appears to be a Viking or Saxon wrist clasp fragment. A few Georgian coins were also found with a pipe tamper emerging too. In all, a very quiet field with no "background" noise or pottery showing except for one piece of C14th pot shard.
We then moved on to field No.2 which was seeded with winter wheat. This was covered in Victorian night soil tippings and was almost as noisy as a green waste field! We surveyed it for half an hour or so and then gave up as there were too many modern items coming up.
We decided to finish off in the stubble field we part-surveyed last week.
The first signal was a cracking early C17th (1611 AD) lead document seal in superb condition. The next signal was a lovely hammered halfgroat of James 1st with another small unidentified hammered to follow.
Eight hammered coins dating between Elizabeth 1st and Charles 1st have now been recovered here.
This field is still in stubble at the moment and will be ploughed just after Christmas which will give us chance to have a look at other permissions that are still awaiting survey.
The link to all the pictures from Sundays dig can be found here.
Next week we are off to a RB settlement that has been deep ploughed for the potato crop that was in there this season. The landowner has said that the field is now flat and will be seeded by the time we get there.
Lets hope that the weather is dry!