This was due to the terrible weather that the whole of Britain has suffered.
This has delayed the spring drilling so the season may be artificially extended and may impact on our fishing season!
In between times I got married at our favourite café, Northcote Manor.
What a great day, finishing off with a stay-over in one of their top rooms (thank you to the generosity of one our neighbours) and a chance to sample their Michelin-starred breakfast!
Here we are 5 weeks later with a write-up on 4 different sites on two different dates.
There were only minor differences between the machine set-ups with the standard GMP mode utilised between a mix of coils.
The coils used were 13" x 11", 9" standard and the 9" HF coils.
Each performed equally without prejudice.
Site 1 (March 24th)
We gained permission to this new site with a stern warning from the landowner that the field we were going to survey had been "heavily walked over during the past 10 years".
Sure enough, we didn't find anything recordable except for the Medieval pottery that the past detectorists had left behind.
We decided to move on to site 2.
Site 2 (March 24th)
We gained this permission back in September 2017 but have never had the chance to visit. This again has been detected heavily over the years and probably one of the reasons why we haven't felt the urgent need to visit.
Seeing as it was only minutes away from site 1 we thought we'd call in and see if we could detect there.
We could see that there were 2 tractors ploughing a nearby field and I tried to ring the landowner. There was no reply so he was obviously in one of the tractors. I then sent a text to which he answered 10 minutes later and said "go for it".
We arrived at a field we'd researched in 2017 and it was in stubble.
The soil was excellent to dig and with that we started to recover bits of lead which was encouraging.
A cut-half was the very first find with a Georgian fob seal coming next.
The seal matrix looks to be Georgian with the seal plate still showing a gold plate covering.
Site 3 (April 1st)
We gained permission from a Council to detect land adjacent to an abbey.
After four-and-a-half hours searching (13.5 hours total) we decided to call it a day. We recovered the expected Victorian coinage but nowhere near the quantity that we expected.
Nothing pre-dating the Victorian period was discovered which just shows that although the site is ancient, nothing Medieval was within detecting range.
Site 4 (April 1st)
This site was in a state of stubble and had been covered by a rally a few years ago and a local detectorist more recently.
Finding fragments of lead and pieces of Medieval pottery was encouraging and the first notable find was a Scottish hammered coin of Alexander III.
Some lovely Medieval artefacts emerged along with half groat of James Ist.
The next signal resulted in a cracking Anglo-Saxon brooch that looks to date to the C6th.
A hammered penny of Edward Ist and another half groat, this time it was a Charles Ist, emerged.
To view the High Definition images of the days recoveries please click here.