Today's survey was planned to cover two areas we've already had a look at and possibly two totally new areas of which we've never detected before.
The bonus being we had the luxury of a lie-in due to the fact that we had 10 hours 37 minutes of daylight to play with as opposed to the 7 hours 27 minutes we had in December last year!
We arrived at the first field which is a really odd shape, 40 acres in size and drilled with winter wheat.
The first area produced a few Medieval artefacts and one hammered coin whilst the other area produced several Roman coins and pottery. The latter we covered when it was first drilled last year so it would be interesting to see what else turned up this time around.
Apart from some Medieval pottery dating to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, nothing of note was recovered.
We moved to the Roman "shrine" area in the same field which was quite small, covering about 10,000sq ft. On the way there a 1791 Hull half-penny was found featuring William III on horseback.
New pottery sherds were evident on the surface which gave us confidence in finding more Roman coinage there. A huge fragment of a grey ware base sherd was lying on the surface which must have had a thin layer of soil covering it as it was too large a piece to miss. The rainfall since last year had obviously helped to reveal this lovey piece of Roman history.
We recovered another 10 Roman grots which was good considering we gridded the area last time around.
We tried all sorts of settings to see if this made any difference. Zero discrimination, Reactivity at zero, 18khz, large coil, small coil, etc etc. When we located a Roman coin signal (these usually registered between 61 - 71) we reset the Déus to standard GMP and went over the target area again, it made no difference whatsoever!
Admittedly, these targets are extremely small signals due to the small coin size and metal content.
Lunch-time beckoned so we headed back to base and agreed to look at the new areas nearby.
We elected to use the "Zebra" method on the new areas. This is our version of the "Union Jack" method used by some on a new field. A full explanation of the "Zebra" principal can be read here.
We also decided to use the large coils to cover as much ground as we could on this was a recce.
The first field to undergo the Zebra search pattern is a 44-acre field drilled with winter wheat which was quite advanced at 6 inches in length. The first signal was a Roman grot then it was fairly quiet after that with just a few bits of lead coming up. We'd Zebra'd the lower half of the field last year with no finds of any significance being found.
With this, we moved to the adjacent field which is a little smaller at 28-acres and also drilled with winter wheat but the crop was much shorter. We carried on using the Zebra method and the tractor tracks that I was following produced a few buttons, lead and green waste but surprisingly some Roman grey ware sherds were on the surface.
Rob's track (24 meters away) shared the same results but his line also produced an Irish penny of Edward Ist. I leap-frogged Rob to start on the next set of tracks whereas Rob elected to tighten up his search pattern using our normal linear search technique. More Roman pottery with a few sherds of Medieval came up on Robs line so I joined him and carried on alongside him.
Thirteen more Roman coins, including a nice example of a coin of Allectus, were retrieved, as well as three Roman fibulae.
With the light fading and the threat of rain coming in, we decided to call it a day.
High definition images of the day's finds can be seen here.
The bonus being we had the luxury of a lie-in due to the fact that we had 10 hours 37 minutes of daylight to play with as opposed to the 7 hours 27 minutes we had in December last year!
We arrived at the first field which is a really odd shape, 40 acres in size and drilled with winter wheat.
The first area produced a few Medieval artefacts and one hammered coin whilst the other area produced several Roman coins and pottery. The latter we covered when it was first drilled last year so it would be interesting to see what else turned up this time around.
Apart from some Medieval pottery dating to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, nothing of note was recovered.
We moved to the Roman "shrine" area in the same field which was quite small, covering about 10,000sq ft. On the way there a 1791 Hull half-penny was found featuring William III on horseback.
New pottery sherds were evident on the surface which gave us confidence in finding more Roman coinage there. A huge fragment of a grey ware base sherd was lying on the surface which must have had a thin layer of soil covering it as it was too large a piece to miss. The rainfall since last year had obviously helped to reveal this lovey piece of Roman history.
We recovered another 10 Roman grots which was good considering we gridded the area last time around.
We tried all sorts of settings to see if this made any difference. Zero discrimination, Reactivity at zero, 18khz, large coil, small coil, etc etc. When we located a Roman coin signal (these usually registered between 61 - 71) we reset the Déus to standard GMP and went over the target area again, it made no difference whatsoever!
Admittedly, these targets are extremely small signals due to the small coin size and metal content.
Lunch-time beckoned so we headed back to base and agreed to look at the new areas nearby.
We elected to use the "Zebra" method on the new areas. This is our version of the "Union Jack" method used by some on a new field. A full explanation of the "Zebra" principal can be read here.
We also decided to use the large coils to cover as much ground as we could on this was a recce.
The first field to undergo the Zebra search pattern is a 44-acre field drilled with winter wheat which was quite advanced at 6 inches in length. The first signal was a Roman grot then it was fairly quiet after that with just a few bits of lead coming up. We'd Zebra'd the lower half of the field last year with no finds of any significance being found.
With this, we moved to the adjacent field which is a little smaller at 28-acres and also drilled with winter wheat but the crop was much shorter. We carried on using the Zebra method and the tractor tracks that I was following produced a few buttons, lead and green waste but surprisingly some Roman grey ware sherds were on the surface.
Rob's track (24 meters away) shared the same results but his line also produced an Irish penny of Edward Ist. I leap-frogged Rob to start on the next set of tracks whereas Rob elected to tighten up his search pattern using our normal linear search technique. More Roman pottery with a few sherds of Medieval came up on Robs line so I joined him and carried on alongside him.
Thirteen more Roman coins, including a nice example of a coin of Allectus, were retrieved, as well as three Roman fibulae.
With the light fading and the threat of rain coming in, we decided to call it a day.
High definition images of the day's finds can be seen here.
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