After a stopover at a lovely seaside apartment, we drove inland to a farm we've visited since 2015.
This farm has two DMV's as well as a very large Roman presence.

We first checked out a field that had a previous archaeological dig, which presented 11 Roman coins.
The second area was a field that had maize growing, but had now been drilled with first wheat after a good plough.
Over 45 Roman coins came up from a small area that we first though there was a Roman shrine.

​A link to the images will be added shortly.

We visited our favourite 7-acre field that has been recently drilled with wheat, which provided perfect conditions for fieldwalking and detecting.
The weather promised to be quite nice with a gentle breeze and sunshine.

The first artefact was a Medieval iron casket key, followed by a mixture of Roman and Medieval items.
One belt mount was recovered with some organic material attached to it.
A lovely Saxon pin emerged, with a sceat, two styca's, three Roman fibula fragments, two hammered coins, a Medieval lock, and other artefacts.

The sceatta is in extremely good condition and is described as being a wonderful masterpiece of early Saxon art. The reverse of this coin is said to represent the battle between good (the bird) and evil (the snake), with several stages of this shown on series Q coins. The example here shows the last stage with the bird trampling the snake, cross before, interpreted as good triumphing over evil. It dates to 710 - 760 AD
One of the styca's looks to be Aerhelred II, 841 to 850 AD, with the moneyer being Forthred.

High definition images of the finds can be seen here.

We arrived on Lindisfarne to enjoy the last dig (10th year) that DigVentures are currently excavating.
Being quite late into the dig, the spoil heaps and trenches had already been scanned by other detectorists.
The only coinage to be found were actually in-situ in the trenches.

Seeing that we were there for 5 days, we had a plan to explore the area for more Medieval evidence.
We had targeted two farms that looked to be good regarding history.
The first field we were interested in was 10 miles from the landowners house.
We spoke to him and asked if we could fieldwalk and detect the field in question, he said yes, and gave us his business card so that we could contact him. This was also handy as it had his email address too.

The field was right next to a church that was steeped in history and dated back to Saxon times.
After several buttons (232 grams) and lead, we recovered just a few artefacts that were of any age. Nothing Saxon emerged, but what did come up was a Punic coin dating to 264 BC!
A couple of hammered coins were found along with many other silver and copper coins with a small amount of buckles etc.


We then visited another farm but there wasn't anyone around.
On the way back to Holy Island, we called in to a farm where there was someone in the yard.
We asked if we could look in a stubble field to which he said lots of people had already looked but only found a couple of coins. He said that they come very often.
He said there was an area where there was a suspected fortified manor house, so he led us there. It was a very small pasture field.
We switched on, and within seconds we had several signals.
We commented to the farmhand that this must never had been detected before to which he answered "Oh it has, several people had detected this field".
They must have used the toy machines you can buy, or they didn't understand the signals as we were finding pre-decimal pennies, and one of the finds was a door handle that was 3 inches in diameter, and only 4 inches deep!
We gave up and returned to the bliss of Holy Island.

​HD pictures of the finds recovered on the church field trip can be seen here.