Today's survey took us back to the new permission that produced the head of Vulcan and the gold stater at the end of last month.
The landowner text me to say that he'd drilled the field after ploughing it.
The field conditions were about as perfect as you could wish for; level and dry with very soft soil that was so easy to dig.
There were lots of ferrous signals, the mineralisation was very high, higher than our normal sites and lots of Roman pottery.
After an hour it became clear that something wasn't quite right but we carried on for another hour just to see if we were in a "quiet" spot.
The third hour saw exactly the same results with only one Roman grot and nothing else of note. This prompted us to call off the search for anything Iron Age or Roman and move on to another permission nearby.
As promised, we called in at the farmhouse to drop off some maps for the landowner for him to mark his fields upon them.
We were met by a chap who happened to be the ploughman and we introduced ourselves. He acknowledged that he'd already seen us detecting earlier.
We gave him our opinion of the field that we'd been detecting by saying that it must have been heavily detected previously.
Our suspicions were confirmed as accurate as he said that there had been several detectorists in that field over ten years, even camping in that particular field!
It doesn't take much to realise that they must have found several items of high value that warranted such intense coverage.
This just shows how fortunate we were to find the gold stater the other week against all odds. Even the camping detectorists have given up coming back due to the lack of finds there after ten years saturation detecting.
Funnily enough, the ploughman said that they'd claimed to have never found anything.... and once gave him a musket ball!
PAS will have missed out on some great records....
We were pleased that our suspicions were accurate but saddened that so much history will have gone unrecorded on the PAS database.
With that we paid a visit to permission number 2.
This one is a totally different beast with the soil extremely hard and claggy when wet.
The first field we surveyed was still in stubble but had been directly drilled. This field was last surveyed in June 2016 with lots of Medieval items being recovered. Sure enough, and as expected, nothing of note was found.
Ploughing this field may reinvigorate it?
The next field was ploughed and drilled with winter wheat and produced Medieval buckles, a jetton, a voided long cross and lots of lead.
We were about to have a look at the field next door when the sprayer arrived! With that, we carried on hoping for more signals.
Nothing else excited the coils so we decided to have a last move to another area of the permission.
Jeeps!! Would you believe it.... we ended up behind the same flipping spraying machine on a tiny country lane! Worse still, it turned into the field we were about to investigate!
Being scuppered, we decided that the odds were stacked against us and we'd call it a day.
Hopefully our next outing will be back on familiar territory upon a field that has just been drilled and produced over 150 Roman coins on 3 previous visits.
For the technically minded; Déus V4.1 with 13" coils and the 9" HF coil operating GMP in standard and a mix of GB set at Manual and Tracking.
Images of both searches can be seen here and here.
The landowner text me to say that he'd drilled the field after ploughing it.
The field conditions were about as perfect as you could wish for; level and dry with very soft soil that was so easy to dig.
There were lots of ferrous signals, the mineralisation was very high, higher than our normal sites and lots of Roman pottery.
After an hour it became clear that something wasn't quite right but we carried on for another hour just to see if we were in a "quiet" spot.
The third hour saw exactly the same results with only one Roman grot and nothing else of note. This prompted us to call off the search for anything Iron Age or Roman and move on to another permission nearby.
As promised, we called in at the farmhouse to drop off some maps for the landowner for him to mark his fields upon them.
We were met by a chap who happened to be the ploughman and we introduced ourselves. He acknowledged that he'd already seen us detecting earlier.
We gave him our opinion of the field that we'd been detecting by saying that it must have been heavily detected previously.
Our suspicions were confirmed as accurate as he said that there had been several detectorists in that field over ten years, even camping in that particular field!
It doesn't take much to realise that they must have found several items of high value that warranted such intense coverage.
This just shows how fortunate we were to find the gold stater the other week against all odds. Even the camping detectorists have given up coming back due to the lack of finds there after ten years saturation detecting.
Funnily enough, the ploughman said that they'd claimed to have never found anything.... and once gave him a musket ball!
PAS will have missed out on some great records....
We were pleased that our suspicions were accurate but saddened that so much history will have gone unrecorded on the PAS database.
With that we paid a visit to permission number 2.
This one is a totally different beast with the soil extremely hard and claggy when wet.
The first field we surveyed was still in stubble but had been directly drilled. This field was last surveyed in June 2016 with lots of Medieval items being recovered. Sure enough, and as expected, nothing of note was found.
Ploughing this field may reinvigorate it?
The next field was ploughed and drilled with winter wheat and produced Medieval buckles, a jetton, a voided long cross and lots of lead.
We were about to have a look at the field next door when the sprayer arrived! With that, we carried on hoping for more signals.
Nothing else excited the coils so we decided to have a last move to another area of the permission.
Jeeps!! Would you believe it.... we ended up behind the same flipping spraying machine on a tiny country lane! Worse still, it turned into the field we were about to investigate!
Being scuppered, we decided that the odds were stacked against us and we'd call it a day.
Hopefully our next outing will be back on familiar territory upon a field that has just been drilled and produced over 150 Roman coins on 3 previous visits.
For the technically minded; Déus V4.1 with 13" coils and the 9" HF coil operating GMP in standard and a mix of GB set at Manual and Tracking.
Images of both searches can be seen here and here.
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