Another beautiful day for a return visit to a recent permission with the bonus of a look at next doors' farm too!
We only had a window of three hours at the first farm (BH) which we hadn't been to since 18th April 2015. In that time we recovered an Elizabeth Ist penny, a few Civil War musket balls, modern coinage, a Medieval jug handle and an Iron Age mount. The field has winter wheat in it currently.

A move to next door saw us start off from exactly where we'd left off on January 14th. Another Elizabethan penny was recovered, an eighteenth century trigger guard but astonishingly, four more stone tools and what appears to be a Stone Age mace fragment were found lying on the surface. The stone tools are temporarily identified as Iron Age loom weights but we can't find any reference to similar stone tools at all. Finding the apparent mace fragment may mean that we have stumbled upon a very early votive site dating back several thousand years! We have never seen anything like these "loom weights" on any of our sites nor images on the 'net...... yet.

We finished off the "loom weight" field and moved to a field that has produced a wide range of recoveries from pre-decimal coinage to Celtic, Saxon and Viking finds.
Low and behold, another stone "loom weight" fragment emerged! This is the first time one of these has been found in this field. In all, 19 of these stone tool fragments have been recovered so far in three fields/areas. 

With the light fading "just one good find would be nice to finish" was uttered.
Would you believe it, sure enough a beautiful early Roman fan tail and bow type fibula was unearthed in superb condition and complete with it's pin.

The 13"x11" coils were used today in the standard GMP mode, one "Tracking" and the other "Manual" Ground Balance. Quite a few targets were within four inches below the surface with some small buttons coming up from six inches!

High Definition images of the days' finds cab be seen here.

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Today's survey (our twentieth outing this season) takes us into deepest darkest Lincolnshire to a site we've not visited since June 2016. With no call to the tenant farmer/land manager, we were going blind as we had no idea as to the field conditions down there. At least we had 8hrs 24mins of daylight to play with. The length of daylight is currently stretching to just over three minutes extra per day at the moment increasing to four minutes by mid-March.
After a major motorway diversion we arrived on site at 8am and the ground was frozen over a drilled wheat field. The crop was very short at a couple of inches in length at most.

We decided to use the 9" coils but staying with the GMP Mode with no tweaks and again, Tracking on one machine and Manual GB on the other machine.​
The field had been cultivated and drilled without ploughing so it would be interesting to see what has been disturbed since last June.
On that visit last June only about half the field was covered as a summer thunderstorm stopped play. As expected, there were hardly any signals whatsoever in that half of the field showing the efficiency of the coverage in June 2016.

However, the other half of the field that wasn't covered last June produced several signals including several small ferrous targets and lots of lead recovered. Amongst these signals were; five hammered coins, two jettons, two Medieval tokens, a lovely Medieval seal finger ring (impression image included), twenty-nine examples of Medieval buckles, mounts and fittings, a Medieval casket key, a couple of skillet legs as well as seven Medieval lead artefacts and weights.
Non-metallic items recovered included a wild boars' tusk, several Medieval jug handles and pottery sherds as well as one fragment of a Romano-British grit-ware pottery sherd.

​As the sun climbed, the ground thawed.... and what a calamity, I don't think that we've encountered such gloopy sticky ground. After clearing several kilo's of mud/clay from the Muck Boots and spades it was only a matter of seconds before the boots and spades were back to square one! It's not often that you see your spade as a spherical mud ball with boots to match.

On the natural history side of things, a flock of pied wagtails were following us about the field and a couple of cattle egrets passed overhead. There's an active badgers sett at the side of the field and there was evidence of them scratching about  on the field. 
Back at home is sunny Preston, both woodland nest boxes are being scrutinized by great & blue tits with lots of territory calls going on. I'm wondering when the nuthatches will also check out the great tit box!

Back to the human history side of things, we are looking to get out this coming weekend but not sure where yet. It was suggested that a return to the Cruise permissions in Staffordshire may be on the cards. These permissions came about when me and the wife were on a cruise and met THREE landowners on board and they all gave permission to survey their land. 
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Meanwhile, High Definition images of all the days finds can be seen here.


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Well, what a luxury to have virtually 8 hours of daylight to play with!
We arrived just as the sun was about to show and giving the clouds a golden glow.
The weather was great with the sky clearing and a slight breeze.
The field surface had a frozen crust and was brilliant to walk on and the drilled winter wheat was just poking through.

This field has produced 8 large fragments of Iron Age loom weights with a handful of Medieval hammered coinage. The loom weights appear to be the result of votive offerings with a ninth being recovered from a field next door.

With the large coils attached using the GMP mode, one machine using "Tracking" and the other set at the standard 90 GB level, we set off following the crop lines.

Initially there were lots of tiny ferrous signals interrupted by lead and pre-decimal coinage. The first PAS qualifying signal was the first of three Elizabethan half-groats to emerge. 
A fourth Elizabethan hammered coin in the form of a Three-pence dated to 1567 was also recovered along with two Roman coins, three more Iron Age loom weight fragments, a thirteenth century casket key as well as a couple of fragments of Medieval pottery.

With the sun below the horizon we decided to call it a day with the prospect of completing the field at another time.

​Full High Definition images can be seen here.

In a world dominated by Windows versus Apple (and others) I though I'd write an unbiased report on the latest laptop that I purchased recently.

With a grand budget of around £1000 pounds I was spoilt with the choice of laptops/notebooks etc that were available.
​This price range included an array of Apple notebooks and laptops but the choice of Windows machines was unparalleled. What a great choice of Windows machines that are available. 

The specs for this cracking laptop/huge tablet can be seen here:
www.asus.com/uk/Notebooks/ASUS-ZenBook-Flip-UX560UQ/

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I thought it apt that I should post an unbiased appraisal of a new smart phone I purchased recently.

I've had quite a few different models over the past including Motorola and recently, a Samsung. After having my Samsung stolen at Christmas I thought about a replacement. Coincidently, EE invited me to an "early" upgrade. One of the upgraded 'phones was the Huawei P9. of which I did the research and came up with some really unexpected results.
Having been given an iPhone 5c I had a good grasp of what was on offer.
I decided to stay with the Android platform and the Huawei P9 won hands down, both on price and extreme performance.

Unboxing the Huawei P9 was a revalation as the packaging was world class as was the internal packages. My partner has an iPhone 7 and she said the packaging was at least equal to the P9.

The full specs can be seen here.

The 'phone has a dual rear camera that is fully embraced by Leica, probably the best optics company in the World!
The processor is an octocore 3 GB system with 32 GB of internal memory.
Looking at the full specs above you can see just how good this 'phone is, but the icing on the cake is the bespoke case that you can buy seperately that is real class in itself! The case has a small window to which the P9 shrinks the display to fit!

If your due an upgrade, check out the Huawei P9, I'm sure you will be impressed.

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Well, here we are with the first dig of 2017 and the first report written using the new replacement laptop, an Asus 560UQ. It will be interesting to see how it handles the photo editing for the future uploads to Flickr.

The survey was going to be at a permission we'd not been to since Feb 2016 and, today, we had the increasing luxury of 7hrs 43mins of daylight to play with. The site is predominantly Roman with a small amount of Victorian night waste evident.
The weather was dry and daylight was just about to break over the newly seeded winter wheat. Although dry, the soil was still damp from previous rain and became very sticky indeed! This resulted in several stops to remove excess mud from the spades, wellies and coil bases!

We pushed on using the machines set-up as normal with the large coils and standard GMP mode. This field holds the record for the fastest recovery of a Roman coin, 20 seconds from switch-on. This wasn't the case today as it was a little longer than that, in fact a lot longer at 600 seconds.

The first of 32 Roman coins recovered came from three inches. All the Roman coins were recovered no deeper than four inches. Small amounts of Roman pottery were also recovered with one piece of Samian Ware being found. Oddly, the Samian piece had what appears to be a saw-cut on one edge. Three George V farthings, a Victorian penny, badges and brooches, a tiny bottle and a watch winder from H. Samuel at 97 Market Street, Manchester were other recoveries made today. An Icelandic coin of 1925 and what looks to be a token of 1918 were surprising coins to appear. 
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Another 4X4 pulled up behind our SV and a chap got out accompanied by three dogs. He made a direct track across the field towards us. I greeted him with a firm hand-shake and introduced ourselves to which he asked who did we get permission from to be there. On telling him he smiled and said that they were his parents.
He asked various questions about the machines and was amazed at how light they were. Funnily enough, we'd just found a rare denarius of Titus and Domitian (under Vespasian) as he got to us so we showed it to him and he was surprised that we knew who the portrait was...Vespasian! He was even more amazed at the age of the coin and that he was the third person to see it for about 1,946 years!

A perfectly round stone, just smaller than a golf ball (40mm), was a find recovered that we'd not seen before. This could be a sling shot or even a large stopper, who knows? I'm sure that we may find something similar whilst researching round stone objects.

Images of the days finds can be seen here.



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