As most detectorists know, finding sites that are dry and detectable are difficult to come by. Only a third of arable land has been drilled with crop.
We've relied upon archaeological digs to get out and about, although, this hasn't been a negative aspect entirely.

A call to a regular landowner gave us the info that some of his land had been 'worked'.
We arrived to find that the first field had been 'worked' but it was too soft and still rough in parts. We did give it a go but it was too much like hard work.

With that, we moved to a stubble field and moved on to yet another stubble field that was seeded with OSR. Not much was coming up and we ended up in a field where we found a hoard of Roman denarii.

A denarius of Augustus was the first denarius to emerge. Lots of Roman pottery lay on the surface and sure enough, three denarii came out of the same hole. They were denarii of Cato, Vespasian and Domitian.
The coins were covered in verdigris showing that were indeed in very close proximity to other coins from the hoard we found 4-years ago.

The field had been ploughed for the first time in 4 years.
This shows that ploughing is advantageous to realising maximum recovery rates. The metal-detecting club I was a member of seven-years ago said that detecting directly drilled land was not good at all for recovery rates.
They were so right, we've detected land that's not been ploughed and the find's rate dropped by at least 90% showing that to find that 'hidden' 10%, you'd have to live very nearby to make it worth the journey.

Some beautiful decorated Samian Ware came up as well as other Roman pottery. Over the day, some nice Medieval pottery and artefacts appeared as well.
A nice neolithic flint leaf blade was another great find adding to the montage of finds we recovered from one of our favourite sites

HD images of the day's finds can be seen here.

The survey today was also on a field that we've not visited for over 30 months, just as last weeks outing.

This field has produced finds from several era's, from the Iron Age to Modern. One of the most interesting periods is from the English Civil War.
We are certain that this area was used by the Parliamentarian troops whilst they prepared to attack their intended target of a large town nearby.
Several artefacts in the form of; musket balls, iron artefacts, C17th pottery and coinage point towards this assumption.

The field was in stubble with copious amounts of weed helping to obscure the field surface.

A slight change to the usual 'modus operandi' was the addition of a special guest from Australia using my trusty Fisher 1266X.
It was going to be interesting seeing how the 1266X fared against the might of 3 XP Déus machines, tuned to perfection.

What a steep learning curve Charlie (our Ozzy guest) had to endure!
We all agree, what a sterling performance he put in as you'll see from the following account of his performance with the Fisher 1266X.

The weather was quite settled but the ground was still quite damp from the onslaught of the previous weeks of rain.
We didn't get as many signals as we thought we might get as the field has been turned over since we were there last.

As expected, the 1266X picked up on lots of ferrous items. Three of these however look to be of interest. One being a hoof pick, the other two being a possible dagger guard and a pike-end.
The 1266X also located a hammered coin in the form of a Phillip and Mary Groat, a 1863 sixpence and a 1921 shilling.
Ironically, this trumped one of the Déus'!
It just goes to show, no matter what machine you have, you'got to walk over it. Hence my personal forum signature of "If you can't hear it, it's not there".
This is aimed at those that doubt their machines performance.

Other finds accountable to the other Déus machines were; a denarius, a couple of Roman coins, a Charles Ist twenty-pence piece, two James Ist pennies, a silver brooch fragment, a chafing dish lug, a couple of nice lead seals and a Civil War buckle.

HD images of the days finds can be seen here.

We've not had the best of starts to our new 2019/2020 season, mainly due to the extremely wet weather that's covered most of the UK.
One of our permissions has recorded over 50" of rain this year whereas there would normally be about 22" of rainfall normally to date.
The small river that runs through the farm was measuring 3.2 tonnes of water flowing per second!
The farm has just over 1200-acres and there has been no movement of farm machinery for the past 10 weeks!

Anyway, back to today's outing to a permission we've not been to for well over 30 months.
Expectations were quite high as we've recovered some lovely artefacts here. Unfortunately, those expectations were too high as we only found ONE grotty Roman coin which, for a site like this, is poor. This goes to show that there is only a finite amount of finds in any particular field or permission. 

However, we did find a couple of nice items, one being a fine example of a coin of Henry VII Minted at Canterbury.

Images of the days finds can be seen here.

Although we've had a slow start to the new season, thankfully, we do however have other avenues to explore.
The latest exciting adventure was a very kind invitation from DigVentures to help explore the gatehouse of Pontefract Castle.

Another promising prospect is a brand new permission to survey a large area that looks to be Bronze Age or Late Iron Age.
LiDAR images reveal a large pentagonal enclosure with other anomalies showing as terracing and large ditches running from the enclosure.

 Back to the Pontefract Dig, and the first levels were removed to reveal lots of expected modern items with three artefacts recovered in the form of; a musket ball and grapeshot from the English Civil War and a fragment of C14th pottery showing the typical green glaze of the period.

We plan to return in a couple of weeks to see what else lies in the earth at Pontefract Castle.
More info can be found here.

We are now a few weeks into our new season that should run to April/May 2020.
The start has been a little slow due to the inclement weather delaying the drilling of the fields we aim to survey.
The upside of things, we will be amazingly busy playing catch-up.
On one farm alone we're awaiting 3 major fields to be drilled, one field in particular that has been targeted by illegal nighthawking thieves.
Ironically, we know the name and address of one of these nighthawkers and we may name and shame him in the coming months.

One project we're about to explore is an early Medieval castle that is being excavated over the next few weeks.
This is quite exciting as we have no idea what may be found as the history here dates to at least the Saxon period.

Another project we are about to embark on is the exploration of an area that may be Bronze Age and leading into the Early Iron Age period.
Our survey results may impact upon another project being run by one of the UK's leading and forward thinking archaeological companies.
They are about to investigate the Bronze Age existence and power in Northern Britain.

​We are also looking forward to exploring our current permissions as soon as they are drilled and ready to survey.

With the weather looking iffy for the Sunday, we decided to venture out on the Saturday instead.
We arrived in glorious sunshine with temperatures already climbing to the expected high of 22C, which isn't bad for the latter end of September!

This is a permission that we acquired recently and we have already paid it a first visit a few weeks ago resulting in some lovely Roman finds.
That was field JC001, we were now about to explore JC002 which looks promising from the research we'd carried out 6 years ago.

I sent the farmer a text and asked was it okay to survey JC002 and he said "yes, it's worked, so don't drive on it". We got there to find it in stubble!!!
I texted him to say I must have described the wrong field and he said "no worries, carry on". 
As we were 'tackling up' the farmer, and his dog, came over to us and we introduced ourselves, as we'd never met before.
I apologised over the field confusion to which he replied "Help yourselves to any of the fields, some are drilled, some worked and the others are in stubble."
We handed over the horse brass (now highly polished) that we found on the last visit and he was well pleased with it. He said that his father will love it as they have quite a large stable with several horses.

We got to the target area of the field and started to walk it. Within a couple of minutes a fragment of a hammered coin (Edward I/II) emerged, quickly followed by a C14th Medieval buckle plate.
This was a great start considering it looked to be a Romano-British site!
Not to worry, the first of the 9 Roman coins was recovered shortly after the buckle plate. More Roman coins were found including an early denarius of Titus dating to AD80 which celebrated the completion or the Colosseum at Rome in AD80 as well as the opening of the Games in the same year.
This coin is considered quite scarce.

The stubble became stiffer as the sun dried it out, so we thought a move might be on the cards, seeing that we had a Carte Blanche canvas to explore the other fields.

Field JC003 was impeccably rolled and drilled, but didn't have any identifiable features, so we were going in blind.
We decided to use our 'Zebra' search method to quickly assess what may lie in this field. Only one find was recovered and that was a lovely example of a Roman penannular brooch complete with its pin.
No other artefacts or pottery were evident meaning that this wasn't a settlement site and that any other finds would be casual losses.

We had a drive around to look at the other fields on the farm and thought doing a 'Zebra' search on some of these might be beneficial.
We split to search two of these fields, one in the stubble and the other two on a perfectly rolled and drilled field.
Nothing was found, with virtually no small iron targets or lead being found
showing that there was very little in lost in these areas. Ironically, in the centre of the stubble field was a Roman crossroads and even this didn't produce any human evidence.

As time was now running short, we had a look at JC004 which was 'worked' and quite flat. Being another large field, we did a 'Zebra' search on this one too.
A cut-half and a Roman grot were the only finds of note but there was an area that had lots of very large chunks of chalk and small ferrous items in a concentrated area of about 100 square metres. Again, no pottery was evident showing that there was a minimum amount of human interaction there.

On reflection, the first field, and our main target area, was the field to be in for finds. We look forward to revisiting this one as soon as it's re-drilled as we'll have full visibility of the field surface.... and no stubble to negotiate.

As usual, we used the 9" HF coils programmed in the standard GMP mode, but the targets were coming up from a slightly deeper level due to the sandy and low mineralised soil.
​
 HD images of the days finds can be seen here.

We received an email from a landowner to say that the field which has produced some of the best Medieval artefacts we've ever found, had been cut. The 4-acre field had been ploughed for the first time in about 3 to 4 years and so it was with high expectations that we set off on today's journey.

Our expectations were quickly dulled on arrival as we found that the straw was still on the ground meaning that almost half the field was covered.
The field surface is very uneven resulting in the combines cutters varying in height by quite a margin. This meant that the stubble was knee-high in some of the parts of the field that didn't have straw on the ground making it impossible to swing the coils efficiently.

Talking of coils, we used the machines in the normal standard GMP settings with the 9" HF coils, hoping that they would cut through the stubble with relative ease. Unfortunately, this wasn't to be, making it extremely difficult in getting the coils to an acceptable ground clearance height.
We're not used to detecting on stubble for obvious reasons, not only because of the loss of low ground clearance, but just as importantly, field surface visibility is lost through the wheat chaff.

We did however manage to recover some nice Medieval artefacts and even the obligatory hammered coin (Henry III).
By lunchtime we threw in the towel and rang the landowner to ask if could have a look at a field that had OSR in it and had been disked.
Swinging the coils would be like pure luxury, with flat conditions, and not many stalks left standing.
Our joy was again dimmed as the field was covered in iron fragments and lots of tin foil, and similar, making it like a greenwaste field.

Apart from the Henry III coin, we recovered strapend plates, buckles, pottery, a beehive thimble, a decorated spindle whorl, Georgian buckles, a great George I halfpenny dated 1721 and a George V florin dated 1923.

HD images of the days finds can be seen here.

As mentioned in a previous post, we've not had the best of seasons with only 17 outings in 12 months!
However, the recovery rate was still fairly commendable with 244 Roman bronze coins, 25 denarii, 1 stater, 23 IA/RB artefacts, 12 Roman fibulae, 40 hammered coins and 80 Medieval artefacts. Of course, an abundance of Roman and Medieval pottery were collected from the field surfaces.
​Let's hope that we can get out more in the forthcoming new 2019/2020 season!

As always, the new season kicked off with a professional archaeological dig on one of our permissions, as well as a venture into the unknown.
The professional dig was on a new site we'd discovered that looked to be a Roman villa that may be slightly more upmarket than the other Roman buildings we've come across.
The unknown bit was a visit to two brand new permissions that we'd researched and, on paper, both looked to to be promising.

Back to "The Dig" .... and the "Big Yellow Trowel" arrived, and Derek, the JCB driver, expertly executed 4 precision-cut trenches under the very close scrutiny of the Archaeological Site Director whom constantly monitored the site to ensure  overall accuracy and control.
Three of the trenches were 20mtr x 1mtr and the fourth was 10mtr x 1mtr.

We called in to see a landowner who bought another farm a couple of years ago. His new farm has some great looking archaeology and is run by his son so we're hoping that it has a potential.
Of course, he was busy storing the grain from the procession of tractors and trailers but had time for a quick word and gave us his son's mobile number.
We rang his son and asked if it was okay to survey the field we were excited to search due to the research. It had just been drilled with OSR and was perfect for walking and detecting. We managed to recover 25 Roman coins, including a denarius, Roman pottery and the obligatory hammered coin.

Meanwhile, the Dig was going to plan with ditches, post-holes, tesserae, a wall and box-flue tiles being excavated. The flue tiles were exciting as they indicate that this Roman building is quite a high status. 
All we need to find is the mosaic floor!
 
On to new permission number 2, we arrived to find that only half of the straw had been collected. The landowner asked us to text him when we arrived and again when we leave. He did say that he may collect the rest of the straw that morning if possible. We started on the half that was clear and a Roman coin emerged after the first 20 minutes.
The progress was very slow indeed and not in the least what we expected as this field had been excavated with several Roman finds coming from 2 trenches. In all, we only recovered 6 Roman coins.
The star of the day was a hammered penny of Henry I that was in fantastic condition. A hammered halfpenny of Henry VI was also recovered.

The landowner arrived and we had a good chat and got on really well.
He said that the Roman stuff was very deep as the site was in the bottom of a shallow valley and with cultivation and soil creep, this had buried the Roman evidence to a minimum depth of over half a metre!
The temperature had soared to over 28C, so we gave up after 6 hours of hard graft.

Back in the excavation trenches, and lots more Roman pottery, nails, roof tile and a lovely intricately carved bone hairpin were uncovered.

The landowners daughter has been after us searching the lake-bed for the last 4 years, so we obliged and so she and her friend led us to the dried up water feature. The western end of the lake is fed by a spring that has probably been there since at least the Iron Age.
A sestertius of Titus was found along with a superb C1st terret ring.

The professional archaeologist opinion on the Roman villa is that it is in fact a building of high status, complete with a hypocaust heating system, mosaic floor and a tiled roof.
Next year, the Dig Team will have to decide whether to extend the trenches on this site or to perhaps excavate where they found neonatal graves last year. Hopefully, they may be able to excavate both sites, but, there are other sites we've found on the Estate that they may also want to explore?!

Hopefully, our two new permissions may prove to be helpful in our aim to boost the amount of PAS records we submit.

The images from the first new permission can be seen here.

​Images from the second new permission can be seen here.







​

The 2018 - 2019 season has been quite tough regarding the volume of outings we've had compared to previous years.
All sorts of things have contributed to this, such as life, weather and our self-imposed rule of not surveying land that has been directly drilled.
The success of the 2018 harvest didn't help either as there wasn't as much spring planting going on upon our permissions resulting in far fewer early 2019 drilling operations. We have however now managed 18 outings resulting in some lovely finds.

Spring forward from March to today and we found ourselves fortunate to enjoy our latest outing thanks to a text from the landowner saying he'd ploughed and drilled a strip of land 10 metres wide and 800 metres long.
Between the 3 of us, we estimated that this should take about 5 hours to complete including a lunch break. This would mean an early finish compared to our usual 8 - 12 hour stints.

The ploughed and rolled strip runs alongside a field that we know has lots of Romano-British activity so it was with great anticipation that we looked forward to this challenge.
The conditions, both weather and field surface were perfect.
It wasn't long before the first of many Roman coins that were recovered, most being grots but some of them were in slightly better condition.
After the first bronze a denarius was unearthed a lovely denarius was found, as well as the beginnings of our Roman pottery collection for the day.

In all, we recovered 35 Roman bronze coins, 5 denarii, a Roman headstud brooch, 4 silver hammered coins, 2 artefacts, 53 pottery sherds, 3 oyster shells and 4 Devils Toenails!

The Lady of the Manor arrived with her two dogs and was surprised but pleased to see us and met us with a very warm greeting.
I'd texted her husband to say we were coming and that he said he'd be back from South Africa on Saturday. He'd obviously not mentioned it to her and I asked were he was, she said "in South Africa". He didn't specify which Saturday he meant in his text LOL!
We asked if there were any other "strips" of land that were accessible and she didn't know of any. She did however invite us to have a drive around the Estate and have a look to see if there were any "strips" to be seen.
We accepted the offer and after an hour we found three more areas that were rolled and drilled. 

Back at the farmhouse, we gave her a demonstration of the drone we have, after handing back their drone which was given to us to see if we could get it to work again.
The demo was well received and she was amazed that it was so stable and that the picture quality was so good. A few images of the drone were then sent to South Africa.

Last year, we mentioned to her husband that we thought that there was a bottle tip on their land and would it be possible to check it out? He said yes we could. She was unaware that we'd asked about the tip and we asked if it was okay to explore it with a mechanical digger in a couple of weeks time?
She confirmed that it would be fine!
We had another quick look at the tip area and we could see broken Victorian crockery, some bottles and a piece of late C18th - early C19th pottery! She did mention that her father had found bottles with glass marbles in them.
Hopefully we'll have more on this in a fortnights' time.

Technical Info
We used 3 Déus machines, all using the 9" HF coil implementing the standard GMP mode.
Most finds were within 5 inches of the field surface with quite a few actually on the surface. One of them being the cut-half hammered coin just to iterate that finds can be at any depth.
There were no "iffy" signals, just pure earphone blasters!

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For the first time in our short history we have come to a stumbling block!

Because of the superb harvesting conditions last year, we've run out of detectable arable land due to the complete and early drilling after the 2018 harvest.
There may be some pasture available at some point but the obstacles here are dry conditions and Stewardship coverage of permanent pasture.

We do however have a couple of arable options that we may be able to explore in the next couple of weeks or so.
There's also an option for us to check out a possible bottle dump.

Meanwhile, Adder hunting and a spot of carp fishing is on the cards as well as monitoring the nesting bird community.

Another distraction for me in particular is the acquisition of a Kamado oven.
These are known as "egg's" in America and are a large part of the outdoor cooking scene.
My wife and I were looking for a new BBQ and a pizza oven but didn't want two separate units if possible.
Our prayers were answered when we discovered the Kamado oven as this covers the wood fired pizza oven aspect as well as; Barbecue, Tandoor, Oven and Smoker! This oven is truly a beast that is so versatile and we look forward to taking it to it's limits.

I'll post separate posts to follow the progress of the Kamado trial trail. 

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