What a lovely start to the day with bright skies and very little wind indeed, with incredible views.
We arrived at new permission number 2 to find that part of the 35 acre wheat stubble field still had crop on it!
That scuppered our plans to survey the main part of the field we were interested in. Instead, we went to plan 'B'.
We set up all three XP machines exactly as we had yesterday except we elected to go for the small coils instead of the large ones.
The soil was very sandy and we had no trouble in using the spades at all.
Within 3 minutes we had our first Roman! Wow!.... we thought, this is going to be an interesting day. It was...but for the wrong reasons...there were quite a few small ferrous signals but not many positive ones from there onwards. In fact, we only had three Roman coins (two grots), a jetton, a Roman weight, 5 pieces of RB pottery and a piece of Jacobean pottery for the entire day! A poor result from a huge RB site with stacks of documented evidence. The aerial photo's alone are outstanding!
There was a discussion very recently on the MDF forum about finding lots of pottery but not many metallic artefacts. This seemed to be the case here.
Hardly any lead and very few positive signals. We even extended our survey to other adjacent fields with the same amount of archaeology, but to no avail.
The landowner however did warn us that the land had been detected for several years and we'd only find shotgun caps. It looks as though a club has had it or there must have been several rallies there. The sad thing is that there doesn't appear to be many PAS records for this area.
I don't think we can accomodate the remaining crop on permission 2 when it's off as we've too much on our plate. I've worked it out that we haven't time to cover the remaining new stubble permissions as together they would take a minimum of 20 visits to accomplish. That would equate to 198 survey acres at 10 acres a visit lasting 8 hours each thats 24 hours a visit! On a very busy site the three of us would struggle to cover more than 1.5 acres each. For example, the site we surveyed on Saturday 24th August, we just about managed 10 acres between the three of us taking into account the small amount of finds we recovered and signals investigated.The remaining new permissions may have to wait until they have been re-ploughed and rolled..... thats if we're allowed to.
The next challenge is to assess and organise the remaining stubble permissions into an order we think fit and drop those we can't survey whilst in stubble. These will have to be added to the 2013 permissions that we surveyed last year when seeded and not re-done this year whilst in stubble.
Anyway.... here's the images of the few artefacts recovered on Sunday 24th August 2014.
I've no idea yet as to where we will be surveying this coming Sunday.... We're having a Skype conference later tonight to discuss the pro's and con's and we'll try to formulate an action plan.
We arrived at new permission number 2 to find that part of the 35 acre wheat stubble field still had crop on it!
That scuppered our plans to survey the main part of the field we were interested in. Instead, we went to plan 'B'.
We set up all three XP machines exactly as we had yesterday except we elected to go for the small coils instead of the large ones.
The soil was very sandy and we had no trouble in using the spades at all.
Within 3 minutes we had our first Roman! Wow!.... we thought, this is going to be an interesting day. It was...but for the wrong reasons...there were quite a few small ferrous signals but not many positive ones from there onwards. In fact, we only had three Roman coins (two grots), a jetton, a Roman weight, 5 pieces of RB pottery and a piece of Jacobean pottery for the entire day! A poor result from a huge RB site with stacks of documented evidence. The aerial photo's alone are outstanding!
There was a discussion very recently on the MDF forum about finding lots of pottery but not many metallic artefacts. This seemed to be the case here.
Hardly any lead and very few positive signals. We even extended our survey to other adjacent fields with the same amount of archaeology, but to no avail.
The landowner however did warn us that the land had been detected for several years and we'd only find shotgun caps. It looks as though a club has had it or there must have been several rallies there. The sad thing is that there doesn't appear to be many PAS records for this area.
I don't think we can accomodate the remaining crop on permission 2 when it's off as we've too much on our plate. I've worked it out that we haven't time to cover the remaining new stubble permissions as together they would take a minimum of 20 visits to accomplish. That would equate to 198 survey acres at 10 acres a visit lasting 8 hours each thats 24 hours a visit! On a very busy site the three of us would struggle to cover more than 1.5 acres each. For example, the site we surveyed on Saturday 24th August, we just about managed 10 acres between the three of us taking into account the small amount of finds we recovered and signals investigated.The remaining new permissions may have to wait until they have been re-ploughed and rolled..... thats if we're allowed to.
The next challenge is to assess and organise the remaining stubble permissions into an order we think fit and drop those we can't survey whilst in stubble. These will have to be added to the 2013 permissions that we surveyed last year when seeded and not re-done this year whilst in stubble.
Anyway.... here's the images of the few artefacts recovered on Sunday 24th August 2014.
I've no idea yet as to where we will be surveying this coming Sunday.... We're having a Skype conference later tonight to discuss the pro's and con's and we'll try to formulate an action plan.
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