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Sunday 3rd April 2016

4/4/2016

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On the way to a site (MFS) that we'd not been to since October 2014 we didn't see a lucky barn owl but we did see some deer.
Whilst enroute we passed three other permissions, two had been drilled but the third was still roughly ploughed.
A landowner from a another permission passed by and turned around to see who we were. We had a chat with him for 15 minutes or so catching up on things.
We arrived at  MFS to find it drilled with spring barley. We geared up to the sound of our very first chiffchaff of the year!
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The first signal was a lovely early Victorian penny. The second signal was a fragment of a Roman Thealby type fibula. Lots of lead in various forms and C17th musket balls from the English Civil War were also recovered.
A gold "T" bar from a pocket watch, Medieval buckles, pottery, flint and a voided long cross cut-quarter emerged.

We heard a deep rumbling in the distance and when we looked around a spraying machine had turned up and started spraying the crop in the next field. I said to Rob that it would be in this field next and very soon!!!
Sure enough it arrived in our field and started spraying. With that, we rang another landowner (who's sprayer was on this permission) and asked if we could visit his land. He said yes so we packed up and visited the landowner to say thanks. She invited us in and made a pot of tea and we stayed there chatting for an hour! I said we'd missed a lot of surveys due to the weather and were going to miss more as I'm off to Lake Garda shortly then Madrid a week later. She said her favourite place was Lake Garda and that she had friends there that owned a restaurant. She promptly showed us a painting of the castle at Sirmione on Lake Garda. The same spit of land also has the largest Roman Villa in northern Italy!
We were also amazed at the number of landowners she knew and said that we'd probably would find interesting things there. She quantified this by saying that when they built a bungalow on the land "loads" of artefacts were found!
As we were leaving, she added that we might want to look at her concrete "coffin" tucked away behind a hedgerow.
JEEPS!! It WAS a coffin! A picture of it is below.
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We made our way to TS1 which is predominantly a Roman site. We were last here a year ago and seeing that it was now 4:30pm we thought we'd make the most of the nice weather.
The site is heavily contaminated with ferrous particles caused by the thousands of Roman nails that have accumulated over the 400 years of occupancy. This was of no consequence to the machines we were using as the Déus just cuts through all that debris easily.
One find of note was a piece of red coral which is an extremely rare to find as it is so soft. This is the second fragment of red coral to be recovered from this site! 
Picture
Another find that you don't see here was a large piece of "pink" granite that was probably used as a pestle for grinding everything from the red coral above to  herbs, seeds and paste mixtures. A mortar was recovered at this site a couple of years ago.
Picture
Eight Roman coins, a Roman coil type finger ring and flint were also recovered in the short time here.

Images from the first site MFS can be seen here and images from the second site TS1 can be seen here.
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