Apart from our jaunt around the English countryside the other week, this was our very first survey of the 2018 - 2019 season.
This is a brand new permission that we came across during that trip.
The landowner said that we could have a look there and then but we had other landowners to see. Rob however decided we should have a look and see what happens.
The field was rolled but had lots of huge voids as the soil was quite dry and solid. Surprisingly we found a cut-half and a denarius of Vespasian in the hour we spent there so it looked to be promising.
We arrived at 8am and the weather was overcast with a southerly breeze but the forecast was said to stay dry.
The field had now been seeded with Oil Seed Rape (OSR) and was flat as a pancake and with no gaping voids at all. The soil was extremely dry and quite powdery although solid enough to give us confidence that depth wont be a problem.
The field was quite large (26-acres) so we had no chance of covering it all but we thought we'd give it our best shot.
This involved the use of our tried and trusted "Zebra" search pattern and this resulted in us quickly finding areas rich in signals and surface finds.
Once we were satisfied where to start, we tightened up our search pattern and it wasn't long before we started to recover lots of Medieval pottery, artefacts and coinage.
In all, we recovered 11 Medieval hammered coins, a bronze stater, 6 Roman coins, several Medieval buckles; one of them zoomorphic, a Medieval casket key, spindle whorls, a Medieval thimble, Medieval skillet fragments, 98 fragments of Medieval pottery with 12 jug handles, Medieval belt mounts and fossils.
The Medieval coinage covered 9 different rulers! There was also a ferrous item that looks to be either a blade or spear as lots of Medieval horse shoes were found too. We were extremely lucky to recover 2 groats (one being Queen Mary Ist)
One item of interest was the base of a bottle with the name P Naide and a date of 1721 below it. Other modern items were a Gin bottle adornment, a cap badge, an aluminium bird ring, 2 ship halfpennies; one was in decent condition, the other badly corroded.
Two 13" X35 coils, one using V5.1, the other V5.2 and the third coil; the 9" HF coil flashed to V5.1. The programs used were GMP for the main part of the day with FAST on the extremely busy ferrous area and a quick blast on HOT just to see how it coped.
One of the V5.2 13" coils was set to TRACKING on all programs and and this setup was extremely successful in recovering a wide range of the finds on the day. This of course could have been luck, but on the whole, all three machines performed brilliantly.
High Definition images of all the finds can be seen here.
There was however a downside to the day, the landowner came over to chat to us and said "glad you're enjoying yourselves, I'll give you a ring next year when I've re-ploughed it and you can come back".
So, now we have to wait until September 2019 before we can return LOL!
This is a brand new permission that we came across during that trip.
The landowner said that we could have a look there and then but we had other landowners to see. Rob however decided we should have a look and see what happens.
The field was rolled but had lots of huge voids as the soil was quite dry and solid. Surprisingly we found a cut-half and a denarius of Vespasian in the hour we spent there so it looked to be promising.
We arrived at 8am and the weather was overcast with a southerly breeze but the forecast was said to stay dry.
The field had now been seeded with Oil Seed Rape (OSR) and was flat as a pancake and with no gaping voids at all. The soil was extremely dry and quite powdery although solid enough to give us confidence that depth wont be a problem.
The field was quite large (26-acres) so we had no chance of covering it all but we thought we'd give it our best shot.
This involved the use of our tried and trusted "Zebra" search pattern and this resulted in us quickly finding areas rich in signals and surface finds.
Once we were satisfied where to start, we tightened up our search pattern and it wasn't long before we started to recover lots of Medieval pottery, artefacts and coinage.
In all, we recovered 11 Medieval hammered coins, a bronze stater, 6 Roman coins, several Medieval buckles; one of them zoomorphic, a Medieval casket key, spindle whorls, a Medieval thimble, Medieval skillet fragments, 98 fragments of Medieval pottery with 12 jug handles, Medieval belt mounts and fossils.
The Medieval coinage covered 9 different rulers! There was also a ferrous item that looks to be either a blade or spear as lots of Medieval horse shoes were found too. We were extremely lucky to recover 2 groats (one being Queen Mary Ist)
One item of interest was the base of a bottle with the name P Naide and a date of 1721 below it. Other modern items were a Gin bottle adornment, a cap badge, an aluminium bird ring, 2 ship halfpennies; one was in decent condition, the other badly corroded.
Two 13" X35 coils, one using V5.1, the other V5.2 and the third coil; the 9" HF coil flashed to V5.1. The programs used were GMP for the main part of the day with FAST on the extremely busy ferrous area and a quick blast on HOT just to see how it coped.
One of the V5.2 13" coils was set to TRACKING on all programs and and this setup was extremely successful in recovering a wide range of the finds on the day. This of course could have been luck, but on the whole, all three machines performed brilliantly.
High Definition images of all the finds can be seen here.
There was however a downside to the day, the landowner came over to chat to us and said "glad you're enjoying yourselves, I'll give you a ring next year when I've re-ploughed it and you can come back".
So, now we have to wait until September 2019 before we can return LOL!
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