As most detectorists know, finding sites that are dry and detectable are difficult to come by. Only a third of arable land has been drilled with crop.
We've relied upon archaeological digs to get out and about, although, this hasn't been a negative aspect entirely.

A call to a regular landowner gave us the info that some of his land had been 'worked'.
We arrived to find that the first field had been 'worked' but it was too soft and still rough in parts. We did give it a go but it was too much like hard work.

With that, we moved to a stubble field and moved on to yet another stubble field that was seeded with OSR. Not much was coming up and we ended up in a field where we found a hoard of Roman denarii.

A denarius of Augustus was the first denarius to emerge. Lots of Roman pottery lay on the surface and sure enough, three denarii came out of the same hole. They were denarii of Cato, Vespasian and Domitian.
The coins were covered in verdigris showing that were indeed in very close proximity to other coins from the hoard we found 4-years ago.

The field had been ploughed for the first time in 4 years.
This shows that ploughing is advantageous to realising maximum recovery rates. The metal-detecting club I was a member of seven-years ago said that detecting directly drilled land was not good at all for recovery rates.
They were so right, we've detected land that's not been ploughed and the find's rate dropped by at least 90% showing that to find that 'hidden' 10%, you'd have to live very nearby to make it worth the journey.

Some beautiful decorated Samian Ware came up as well as other Roman pottery. Over the day, some nice Medieval pottery and artefacts appeared as well.
A nice neolithic flint leaf blade was another great find adding to the montage of finds we recovered from one of our favourite sites

HD images of the day's finds can be seen here.

The survey today was also on a field that we've not visited for over 30 months, just as last weeks outing.

This field has produced finds from several era's, from the Iron Age to Modern. One of the most interesting periods is from the English Civil War.
We are certain that this area was used by the Parliamentarian troops whilst they prepared to attack their intended target of a large town nearby.
Several artefacts in the form of; musket balls, iron artefacts, C17th pottery and coinage point towards this assumption.

The field was in stubble with copious amounts of weed helping to obscure the field surface.

A slight change to the usual 'modus operandi' was the addition of a special guest from Australia using my trusty Fisher 1266X.
It was going to be interesting seeing how the 1266X fared against the might of 3 XP Déus machines, tuned to perfection.

What a steep learning curve Charlie (our Ozzy guest) had to endure!
We all agree, what a sterling performance he put in as you'll see from the following account of his performance with the Fisher 1266X.

The weather was quite settled but the ground was still quite damp from the onslaught of the previous weeks of rain.
We didn't get as many signals as we thought we might get as the field has been turned over since we were there last.

As expected, the 1266X picked up on lots of ferrous items. Three of these however look to be of interest. One being a hoof pick, the other two being a possible dagger guard and a pike-end.
The 1266X also located a hammered coin in the form of a Phillip and Mary Groat, a 1863 sixpence and a 1921 shilling.
Ironically, this trumped one of the Déus'!
It just goes to show, no matter what machine you have, you'got to walk over it. Hence my personal forum signature of "If you can't hear it, it's not there".
This is aimed at those that doubt their machines performance.

Other finds accountable to the other Déus machines were; a denarius, a couple of Roman coins, a Charles Ist twenty-pence piece, two James Ist pennies, a silver brooch fragment, a chafing dish lug, a couple of nice lead seals and a Civil War buckle.

HD images of the days finds can be seen here.

We've not had the best of starts to our new 2019/2020 season, mainly due to the extremely wet weather that's covered most of the UK.
One of our permissions has recorded over 50" of rain this year whereas there would normally be about 22" of rainfall normally to date.
The small river that runs through the farm was measuring 3.2 tonnes of water flowing per second!
The farm has just over 1200-acres and there has been no movement of farm machinery for the past 10 weeks!

Anyway, back to today's outing to a permission we've not been to for well over 30 months.
Expectations were quite high as we've recovered some lovely artefacts here. Unfortunately, those expectations were too high as we only found ONE grotty Roman coin which, for a site like this, is poor. This goes to show that there is only a finite amount of finds in any particular field or permission. 

However, we did find a couple of nice items, one being a fine example of a coin of Henry VII Minted at Canterbury.

Images of the days finds can be seen here.