A bit of a dull, grey start to the day greeted us on our trip to a permission we visited a couple of weeks ago.
We arrived at 9am and unlocked the main gate with two more gates between us and the fields we were going to survey.
The first field has winter wheat which was just showing, the second field also had winter wheat with the third drilled with oil seed rape (OSR).
The first field had only been disked so we didn't expect too much from this visit. A setertius, a hammered penny and a fragment of a C2nd headstud brooch were the highlights here.
The second field had been ploughed and both this session and the last visit both proved testament that a field needs to be ploughed to produce the maximum amount of recoveries. A lot more pottery was also brought to the surface with some great examples to show for the effort.
We thought we'd pop over to field number three which has an area which we have labelled the "Shrine" spot.
The OSR was quite advanced making it pretty difficult to swing the coils, especially the 13" X35 coils. Nether-the-less, we still recovered 9 Roman coins in 10 minutes. This area will definitely be on our to-do list when it's re-ploughed next autumn!
With the challenge of the OSR beating us, we headed back to field #2 and recovered more Roman bronzes and pottery.
The landowners were out with their dogs and warmly greeted us with news of what's been going on at the Estate.
Another hour saw the dreaded drizzle coming in so we thought we'd finish off after having a so-so day. This wasn't bad news though as the early finish allowed us to have a look at another permission on the way home.
The end result was 29 Roman coins, a fibula fragment, a hammered penny and lots of great Roman pottery!
One of the images below shows how tiny some of the Roman coins are against something the size of sestertius or dupondius.
This permission has been out-bounds for over a year as it had potatoes in all three fields that cover a small Roman villa. This as you can imagine had been ploughed to its maximum depth!
You can also imagine our faces when we saw that all of it had been perfectly rolled and freshly drilled. We don't know with what yet as there was no sign of any shoots.
A quick email to the landowner with a super-fast response of "Hi Paul, yes, that would be fine".
So, that's next weekend sorted.....weather permitting!
The technical bit was as it was last week although I did try a few new things just for the hell-of-it. I couldn't get used to the XY screen because I'm so used to checking out the mineralisation as I go using the 'normal' horse-shoe screen.
Full HD images can be seen here.
We arrived at 9am and unlocked the main gate with two more gates between us and the fields we were going to survey.
The first field has winter wheat which was just showing, the second field also had winter wheat with the third drilled with oil seed rape (OSR).
The first field had only been disked so we didn't expect too much from this visit. A setertius, a hammered penny and a fragment of a C2nd headstud brooch were the highlights here.
The second field had been ploughed and both this session and the last visit both proved testament that a field needs to be ploughed to produce the maximum amount of recoveries. A lot more pottery was also brought to the surface with some great examples to show for the effort.
We thought we'd pop over to field number three which has an area which we have labelled the "Shrine" spot.
The OSR was quite advanced making it pretty difficult to swing the coils, especially the 13" X35 coils. Nether-the-less, we still recovered 9 Roman coins in 10 minutes. This area will definitely be on our to-do list when it's re-ploughed next autumn!
With the challenge of the OSR beating us, we headed back to field #2 and recovered more Roman bronzes and pottery.
The landowners were out with their dogs and warmly greeted us with news of what's been going on at the Estate.
Another hour saw the dreaded drizzle coming in so we thought we'd finish off after having a so-so day. This wasn't bad news though as the early finish allowed us to have a look at another permission on the way home.
The end result was 29 Roman coins, a fibula fragment, a hammered penny and lots of great Roman pottery!
One of the images below shows how tiny some of the Roman coins are against something the size of sestertius or dupondius.
This permission has been out-bounds for over a year as it had potatoes in all three fields that cover a small Roman villa. This as you can imagine had been ploughed to its maximum depth!
You can also imagine our faces when we saw that all of it had been perfectly rolled and freshly drilled. We don't know with what yet as there was no sign of any shoots.
A quick email to the landowner with a super-fast response of "Hi Paul, yes, that would be fine".
So, that's next weekend sorted.....weather permitting!
The technical bit was as it was last week although I did try a few new things just for the hell-of-it. I couldn't get used to the XY screen because I'm so used to checking out the mineralisation as I go using the 'normal' horse-shoe screen.
Full HD images can be seen here.
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