Remembrance Sunday, 100 years since the end of World War One.
My poppy was tucked away safely under layers of warm clothing.
Here we were, at a site that pre-dates WWI by at least 1700 years and wondered how the Iron Age people interacted with the invading Roman army.

The two (used to be three) fields we were going to explore had previously been deep ploughed for potatoes and were now rolled and drilled with Winter Wheat. We've had some great finds from 7 previous visits and we anticipated that this visit may be very productive. The last visit was January 2017.

The soil was slightly damp from the previous evenings rainfall so it was a little "sticky". This meant several attempts to shed the mud build-up on the wellies therefore wasting precious detecting time!

It was only a matter of a couple of minutes before the first Roman coin made an appearance. This was quite a welcome sign as there was also lots of modern metallic items lurking beneath the fields surface.
This was almost a similar situation to the green waste problem we've had as buttons and parts of watches are just as attractive as bits of MFI furniture fittings... not!

We pushed on and the horizon became very murky indeed.... and heading our way. Sure enough, it started drizzling and the hope was that it would pass. It did, but only to bring heavier rain with it.
We retreated to the vehicles which, when inside, made the rain sound even worse, as it does. Thankfully, this was only to last 15 minutes or so, and we could see that brighter weather was on its way. Thankfully, the soil wasn't any more sticky than it was before. 

Time-wise, we were up against it with lots of non-ferrous signals and constant mud slinging stopping us in our tracks. 
However, we still managed to recover 35 Roman coins with some lovely examples including a denarius of Hadrian and a siliqua of Constantius II. A denarius of Vespasian came up and was very similar to one we found very recently dating to 79 AD.
Oddly, we only found 2 Roman artefacts and these were only small items, one being a cosmetic implement and the other a fragment of a fibula with a trace of blue enamel showing.
Quite a few fragments of Roman pottery were recovered with one piece of Samian Ware depicting a hare being hunted. 
10 fragments of lead toys were found with at least 5 of them being soldiers which was quite poignant being that it was Armistice Day.
Another poignant find was the Leicester fretwork piece with thoughts of the tragic accident that happened recently at Leicester City's football ground.
Another surprise was a George III shilling dated 1817 in very good condition as well as a token from Dublin dating to 1876.
A rare Brass Workers Strike medallion saw the light of day too and this item is probably a story on its own.
A number of pre-decimal coins were found including; farthings, half-pennies, a penny and a Lizzy II sixpence.

The technical side of the day was that two 9" HF coils and one 13" X35 coil were under the control of standard GMP mode.
Most finds were within the first 5 inches of the field surface with the larger items being deeper, the deepest at 12".

High Definition images of all the finds can be seen here.

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A bit of a dull, grey start to the day greeted us on our trip to a permission we visited a couple of weeks ago.
We arrived at 9am and unlocked the main gate with two more gates between us and the fields we were going to survey. 
​The first field has winter wheat which was just showing, the second field also had winter wheat with the third drilled with oil seed rape (OSR).

The first field had only been disked so we didn't expect too much from this visit. A setertius, a hammered penny and a fragment of a C2nd headstud brooch were the highlights here.

The second field had been ploughed and both this session and the last visit both proved testament that a field needs to be ploughed to produce the maximum amount of recoveries. A lot more pottery was also brought to the surface with some great examples to show for the effort.

We thought we'd pop over to field number three which has an area which we have labelled the "Shrine" spot.
The OSR was quite advanced making it pretty difficult to swing the coils, especially the 13" X35 coils. Nether-the-less, we still recovered 9 Roman coins in 10 minutes. This area will definitely be on our to-do list when it's re-ploughed next autumn!

With the challenge of the OSR beating us, we headed back to field #2 and recovered more Roman bronzes and pottery.
The landowners were out with their dogs and warmly greeted us with news of what's been going on at the Estate.
Another hour saw the dreaded drizzle coming in so we thought we'd finish off after having a so-so day. This wasn't bad news though as the early finish allowed us to have a look at another permission on the way home.
​The end result was 29 Roman coins, a fibula fragment, a hammered penny and lots of great Roman pottery!
​One of the images below shows how tiny some of the Roman coins are against something the size of sestertius or dupondius.

This permission has been out-bounds for over a year as it had potatoes in all three fields that cover a small Roman villa. This as you can imagine had been ploughed to its maximum depth!
You can also imagine our faces when we saw that all of it had been perfectly rolled and freshly drilled. We don't know with what yet as there was no sign of any shoots.

A quick email to the landowner with a super-fast response of "Hi Paul, yes, that would be fine". 
So, that's next weekend sorted.....weather permitting!

The technical bit was as it was last week although I did try a few new things just for the hell-of-it. I couldn't get used to the XY screen because I'm so used to checking out the mineralisation as I go using the 'normal' horse-shoe screen.
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​Full HD images can be seen here.