It looks like this will be our last dig of 2017 ....and almost half-way through our season which should end May 2018.
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We arrived at our newest permission to be greeted by wheat stubble that was still quite stiff!
The weather was fantastic with pure blue skies and a frost-encrusted field surface. 

We'd targeted an area that looked to be quite interesting and the first signal produced an Iron Age La Téne brooch. The next signal was a Roman grot.
Over the day we recovered 9 Roman coins including a superb example of a sestertius or As of Domitian, a Roman finger ring, a cut-half penny, the IA brooch and the largest lead IA toggle fastener "look-a-like" we'd ever seen!
Up to present, nobody has been able to provide evidence of what this last item is. At the moment, it looks as though this is a tool for securing twine or cord and locking into place instead of being a bobbin as surely, bobbins would have been made from wood?
Also recovered were three large ferrous items, one of them appears to be a meat cleaver!

We called in at the farmhouse to be greeted by the landowners son.
He very kindly gave us the owners email address and established who owned three other fields we were interested in. Thankfully they belong to the same landowner and they are detectable!

Lets just hope the second half of the season is as fruitful.

The same combination of machines, coils and programs were used as on Christmas Eve with the HF coil winning further admiration.

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

We elected to carry on from where we left off a couple of weeks ago at permission MC. This permission has produced some great finds over the 4 years we've been visiting there.
The field had been drilled with wheat and was still very short with a fresh crust of frosted soil capping the surface.

We could see that the field had been visited by nighthawkers in the last couple of days or so as there were footprints and holes everywhere.

Anyway, undeterred, we carried on and managed to recover 24 Roman bronze coins, 2 Roman fibulae with pins, a denarius, a superb Iron Age finger ring (coiled type) and lots of pottery.

Two 13" coils and the deadly 9" HF coil were used with the GMP mode.
I say "deadly" as the HF coil is proving to be a superb tool in our armoury picking out small Roman coins with ease.

We called into the farmhouse to let them know that there were other detectorists on their land and to wish them a great Christmas and New Year.

We'd tried calling a landowner nearby but couldn't get through on the 'phone so we thought we'd drop in and hope he was in high Christmas spirits!
We were greeted by several dogs, and the landowner soon after.
After our introductions he said we could search his land and asked when we were thinking of coming? We said "Thursday, if the weather is okay!".
"Fill yer boots" and with that we went on our very merry way.

High Definition images can be seen here.

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