We arrived on site at 8am to be faced with a field that was 1.26 miles in length! This is another new permission along with the one we visited last Saturday. The field measures c.176 acres and is cultivated OSR.
We had previously GPS'd a couple of locations so as to highlight the areas we had researched to make it a little easier surveying such a vast field.
The research came back as a first century RB site that was vacated soon after it was established. The area was fieldwalked in the 1950's by a group of local archaeologists along with experts experienced in RB history.
Our survey concluded that the 1950's fieldwalk was indeed accurate as we only recovered one dupondius and six pieces of pottery, greyware and one piece of samian. There was very little in the way of metallic evidence such as nails, coinage and other artefacts.
One point that we should mention here is about the "depth" that our machines could achieve when necessary.
Last week a target was located by one of the Déus' and indicated that it was deep. The Déus showed that the object could be ferrous but we decided to check it out. The item was indeed ferrous in the shape of a cast iron Victorian cooking pot at 26 inches in depth!
We again located a deep target on this 176 acre site and this time it was even deeper..... a ferrous plate at 32 inches.
These depths were measured so as to be accurate.
We decided that we would call in and see the landowner as we hadn't met him yet!
We got to the farmhouse and were confronted with an electric gate so we jumped out and walked the rest of the way.
On arrival we were met by the landowners wife and got along fine and chatted about what we had found, or not found as in this case. We asked if we could survey other fields if the research dictated so, she said of course.
We elected to ring our other new landowner and asked about two possible sites that we could carry out a selective survey. He said no problem, they were both in stubble.
The first field was near to a RB settlement but there was a lot of wheat chaff on the ground so we only had about a 20% view of the field surface. This would make it very difficult in recovering any surface pottery.
No ferrous or non-ferrous items were detected so after the time allotted we drove to the second area of interest.
The second area was adjacent to a moated site so the rest of the day was going to be spent surveying around the periphery of the moat.
Again, there were very little in the way of ferrous and non-ferrous signals, however, we did recovery a piece of C13th pottery and a groat of Edward III as well as a small strapend buckle.
We are looking forward to next weekend as we may have a chance of surveying ETF, a site we havn't been to since 2013 due to crop conditions.
Images of the recovered coins and artefacts can be see here and here.