Each year, in between the survey seasons, I try my hand at angling.

This is mainly centred on still water lakes and ponds dotted around Lancashire. The waters are not very big but they have copious amounts of fish. These range from roach and tench to bream and carp. It's the latter that I aim to fish for.

This year saw the purchase of a new £140 carp rod, something that I​'d promised myself years ago. I say £140.... I actually managed to buy it for £34.99.
Another new piece of kit I acquired was a controller float called a Bolt Machine.

Day One
Being so used to using my normal method of pole and free-line, I neglected the new rod purchase.
I somehow thought that I would give up my comfort blanket and try out this new piece of kit.
I arrived at a lovely lake that has a mixture of fish including some nice sized carp. 

I catapulted some dog biscuits out into the lake and began to tackle up.
It took a short while, but sure enough, the carp started to feed and as more feed went in, the feeding frenzy grew accordingly.
The Bolt Machine was cast and the distance covered by using the new rod was nothing short of astounding. The Bolt Machine travelled way past my expected landing point.

15 carp were landed to 12lb, with some smashing the line with ease.

All in all, a great day out on a beautiful lake....

Day Two
Today saw a visit to a complex that has three ponds which includes one that I've managed 90 fish in a session!
A challenge was sought, so I thought I'd try a larger pond with an island in the middle.
 
Again, dog biscuits were fired out and sure enough, the carp became interested. 
Another 20 carp were landed with another 5 breaking the line!

Day Three
Back to the lake I visited on day one with the conditions just perfect for floater fishing. Once again, the extremely economical dog biscuits were catapulted out into the lake at a distance of about 80ft.
 
There were a few other anglers nearby and two of them came around to watch from my vantage point.
Both couldn't believe what they were seeing as at least 40 carp were landed and at least 15 others broke to freedom.
The water was actually "boiling" with carp and other fish joining in the feeding frenzy.

I'm quite impressed with the new rod and the Bolt Machine, now it's a case of pole versus new rod!

I'm looking forward to experimenting further before the survey and detecting season starts in earnest.

Here we are at the end of our 2017 - 2018 season with some great finds indeed. The PAS (Portable Antiquities Scheme) database has been updated as per our procedures and more records will be added over the coming weeks after cleansing and meticulous photography.

Although we had a fantastic season with two Iron Age coins being recovered, along with several Roman bronze coins, denarii, Medieval coinage and various fibulae, we were down on last seasons' results as follows:

Roman bronze coins  < 27%
Denarii                       < 14%
Iron Age coins            < 50%
Fibulae                       < 22%
Medieval coins           < 34%

The above figures include incredible sites that we have discovered over the years and reflect that the overall outcome, surveying these same sites, will inevitably result in those figures reducing even further, until eventually they will reach <99% .

Fortunately, full-blown archaeological excavations on our sites may reveal far more evidence on top of what we've already achieved. 
One such excavation is taking place later this year and we can't wait to see what is revealed. I'm sure that The British Museum are looking forward to the results just as we are. 

​Roll on the 2018 - 2019 season!

We took the chance to meet up with a fellow detectorist whilst she was up'th north visiting relatives.
We were hoping to meet up on a rally down south in September but we're double-booked and involved with a large archaeological dig on Lindesfarne!

We'd never met before so instead of the "I'll be wearing a white carnation" it was a case of car descriptions, our female compatriot was in a black vehicle and I said that we were in a blue and silver number.

We met up at a local pub and had a couple of drinks and a chat about all things metal-detecting and archaeologically inspired.

For various reasons she was camera shy so unfortunately there's only a couple of Rob and I.....
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It's always lovely to meet up with fellow detectorists and hopefully we will achieve a few more meet-ups during the new season.

Whilst I was slumming it in Lake Garda in the foothills of the Italian Alps, one of the team ventured out to a local site that has been excavated several times over the years. Even Time Team had a go a while back!

Rob was warmly greeted by the lead archaeologists who were in charge of proceedings and they kindly asked where his "team" mate was!
He assured them that I was okay and looking at "real" Roman items in Italy.

Now that I'm back in the UK I will make an effort to visit the site before we get bogged down in our own interests involving Robin, Rob and myself.

Anyway, back to Rob's visit; the archaeologists decided to dig out a large section of clay to see what was underneath it using the mattock method.
The spoil heap was subsequently scanned by Rob and an extremely unexpected item turned up....... a silver Roman knee brooch!

The whole of the archaeological community there were bewildered at the find and instantly recognised the importance of metal-detectorists joining a full scale archaeological dig.
Rob did go on to find a minim too in the spoil heap!

What an accolade for us guys (ie; fellow detectorists) .... and one in the eye for our antagonists, especially those abroad that are nothing to do with archaeology in the slightest and more interested in picking up fares.

Here's a couple of images taken by the archaeologists.....
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Again, this shows the importance and advantages of metal-detectorists interacting with archaeologists, and another step forward in the ever increasing union between two such powerful and important groups of people.

Lets hope that this model can be replicated in Europe, if not the World!

Well, here we are, perhaps one of the last digs this season, certainly on arable soil we are thinking?
The field had been ploughed along one edge of an already established wheat crop. The soil was damp and quite claggy with differing mixes of clay in it's soil profile. It is at least 5 years ago since this was last ploughed and the condition of most of the Roman coins recovered are testament to this area not seeing much plough activity.

Apart from recovering 1.44kg of mainly Roman pottery, we also found 28 Roman coins including two denarii, some of the coins had very nice detail indeed! A Roman fibula and other artefacts, mainly Roman came to light.
There were some nice examples of base sherds including one from a Roman grey ware goblet. A piece of molten slag had bronze and silver within it and another item, a mount, resembles the "Swastika" symbol.
The beginning of the search along the strip highlighted two major areas of ferrous targets with what must have been hundreds of nails. A couple of these beggars are featured below. The Déus just sailed through these with ease, although Déus "Fast" was used in certain sections.

We had a quick look at a nearby field that also had a ploughed and drilled strip along its edge. This produced something we hadn't seen for a long while, a decorated spindle whorl.

Unfortunately, we didn't film any of today's survey due to the conditions (mud everywhere) so hopefully the 70 images from the day will make up for it? 

Below is an image showing some of the ferrous nails mixed in with copper alloy nails and two coins for a size comparison. As you can see, the coins are quite small compared to the nails but this didn't present a problem.

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The above coin is a follis of Constantine I dating to AD 310-313. These are sometimes silver coated but this example doesn't appear to have been silvered.

The finds, as usual, came from the first 5 inches of the field surface and all detected using the GMP setting as standard except one machine used "Tracking" for GB and one of the coils used was the 13" which actually recovered the smallest coin of the day.

​70 High Definition images can be seen here.

After several requests to create videos of our excursions we decided to attempt our first video.

​The footage was captured with the same camera that is used for the still's images that you see on our Flickr site.
The Lumix DMC TZ71 is quite a small camera and has a great wide-angled lens so any camera movement is quite smooth.
Unfortunately, as we found out last Sunday, the wind noise was very loud as it was probably one of the windiest days we've ever encountered whilst detecting!

One of the biggest challenges was filming AND metal-detecting at the same time. However, we did find a method that was fair to the cameraman so that the detecting time lost was kept to a minimum.

The resulting film shows the conditions of the site and the linear methodology we use to such great effect.

The film can be seen here.

Hopefully we can continue to film our future ventures into the world of ancient history.

After last week's session, first-time bottle digging, we now had an opportunity to re-visit one of our favourite sites that has a multitude of varied settlement evidence across the landscape.

This particular field has what we suspect to be a small Roman villa, also known as a farmstead.
The evidence we've acquired over the last couple of visits has shown that the villa had quite wealthy owners in that they had a tesserae floor with partial roof tiling and had use of Samian Ware dishes.
Fibulae have also been recovered along with Roman coinage including denarii as well as a few hammered coins including one of King Harold.

The weather conditions were sort of  perfect, with a clear sky, and a lovely cooling breeze coming from the East. There was a downside however, the breeze would prove to play havoc with the video sound levels! This will make it tricky when it comes to editing as I would prefer to keep the original sound. Once the images for Flickr are sorted, I'll start on the video.
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The field was perfectly flat with none of the pea crop showing which allowed 100% visibility of the surface making it easy to spot any surface pottery etc.
However, the soil was extremely dry and powdery, almost like fine sand. This didn't bode too well for depth, but there again, most of our small finds come from within 5 inches of the field surface anyway!

The first run was down the headland and the first signal was a Roman fibula dating from the C1st or early C2nd with a few pieces of greenwaste appearing. This permission has lots of greenwaste covering most fields which make some of them un-detectable.
We then followed the main drill direction and it wasn't long before the Roman grots began to appear.

The area that we suspected may be a Roman building had a scatter of chalk which stood out against the slightly darker soil colour. This may have been part of the original flooring along with a small area of tesserae to add a luxurious feel to the building? Some of the tesserae were of different colours. Over thirty pieces of tesserae were recovered and logged to ten decimal places on the GB OS GPS system, as were all recordable finds. 

We recovered 2 denarii (one quite rare), 21 Roman bronze coins, 2 fibulae (one with traces of enamel), 1 Roman key-ring (scarce), the obligatory hammered coin (Tudor), a Medieval buckle with tongue, several fragments of Roman pottery (1.89kg), oyster shell as well as 5 fragments of Medieval pottery dating to C13th. 
All of these can seen in High Definition on our Flickr site.

We called in to see the landowners as we haven't seen them for a while and the lady of the house put the kettle on the agar and made us both a cup of tea. We had a great catch up and checked out the report on the archaeological survey that we had organised there last year. The report was superb and they even included a preview to the another dig later this year.
Lovely to see that the team at Priscan Archaeology have received official recognition from the highest echelons of the archaeological world in recognition of the hard work we've put in to get this dig up and running. This is truley a reflection on all responsible detectorists and an example of what can be done if you put your mind to it.

During the catch up we confirmed that we will restructure their WiFi setup and bring the whole farm communication system up-to-date.
This will benefit the information centre they have and enable visitors to use all the new facilities on offer.

​Of course, we will submit all today's findings from this villa site to the landowners, and the archaeological team, in order to assess the full excavation potential for 2019.

High Definition images of today's finds can be seen here.

A double-edged sword with regards to today's survey as the weather promised to be fabulous but then there was the threat of the Bank Holiday traffic. Indeed, the weather was great, if a little warm and the field had been part power-harrowed. The traffic both ways was quite easy going to be honest, in fact it was better than some of the "normal" weekends!

Just before we made a start on our target field, we paid a visit to a permission nearby to check the field conditions there. All three fields had been deeply ploughed to at least 12 inches which left 2ft furrows and consequently, the potato planting was now in full progress.
This bodes well for when the next wheat crop is drilled later this year or early 2019. 

​Back to the target field; we made progress down the eastern side of the  field and found the conditions to be very crumbly and dry.
The temperature was already beginning to soar and the first of 28 Roman coins began to emerge. Most were "grots" but this field does throw up some superb examples, as we saw last week with the fantastically detailed follis of Crispus coming up.
A tractor arrived after an hour and started to power-harrow the remainder of the field alongside where we were detecting. This made the field even flatter than it was before, although quite soft and aerated.

We were then joined by two other detectorists but they didn't appear to be sticking to any planned or structured search pattern. At one point they were 150 metres apart and were travelling in different directions to each other.
It wasn't too long before one of them came alongside us and started to chat  about our machines and settings we were using as they were both using a different brand of detector.
They stayed for three hours and found a total of 3 Roman grots. What was amazing is that one was walking at a brief pace using full-sized steps whilst the other chap was "pendulum" swinging with the coil at least 10" above the ground at the end of each swing.
​It just shows that even with this method of searching, it can still result in the recovery of finds!
 
Apart from the 28 Roman coins/grots, the artefacts we managed to recover were as follows; a nice Roman fantail fibula with red and blue enamel still evident, a large Roman finger ring, a coiled Roman finger ring, a Roman buckle, a Roman pin, a Roman connecting link, 3 lead spindle whorls/weights, a George III sixpence, a Dutch one-cent piece dating to 1881, Medieval strapends, a Rose farthing, a cartwheel penny and a few pieces of Roman pottery.

As last week, the 13" coil and two 9" HF coils were used in the standard GMP mode. One of the 9" coils were set at 75 on the Manual GB setting.
All signals were strong and confident with no "iffy" signals at all.
Even the tiniest of minims were found with ease along with tiny pieces of lead too. 

High Definition images can be seen here. 

We managed to part-survey 2 sites today, one predominantly Medieval and the other predominantly Roman.

Site 1 was newly drilled Spring Wheat offering great detecting and fieldwalking conditions.
As mentioned, most items recovered here reflect the whole Medieval period including Saxon and C14th artefacts.
Oddly, 3 Roman grots were found along with a hammered silver looking like a James Ist half-groat, a pierced jetton, bronze beads, strapend fragments, buckles, pottery and a couple of fossils!

We decided to have a look at another site to assess the conditions there.
On arrival we could see that 3 fields had been deep ploughed over the top of a Roman settlement. The worry here is that the crop may be potatoes which means it will be off the agenda for a long while even though we are allowed to detect newly seeded potatoes. It's by personal choice that we don't survey potato crops.
Apparently, there may be a potato shortage as the growers down south are 6 weeks behind schedule.

We moved on to site 2 to find it power-harrowed and quite flat.
Being a large Roman site we expected to find evidence quiet quickly and the first of 17 Roman coins emerged within the the first minutes of switching on. Some of the coins were in amazing condition and the other coins that were recovered were a siliqua, a cut-half and a William III love token.

On both sites we used 1 x 13" coil and 2 x 9" HF coils, standard GMP with one of the 9" coils in "Tracking" mode.

High Definition images of the days finds can be seen here and here.

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We weren't out detecting this weekend but all was not lost as it was a chance to kick-off the adder spotting season.

The weather wasn't the best for adders as it was overcast but quite bright with the sun threatening to poke through.
Unfortunately, this area is now quite well known and we could see four people scouring the area looking for adders. What was concerning was that at least two of the group had "handy reachers" which look like litter picking implements. Why on earth would they have these upon them?

We steered clear of where this group was and concentrated on areas where we had seen adders before.
We managed to spot two females trying their best to absorb as much warmth as they could.

We decided to search an area 1km to the east of our first search area.
Another female was located and her eye's were "milky" showing that she was about to slough.

Back to where we'd parked, we decided to look at an area near to a stream as the sun had now decided to shine seeing that we were going home!
This was rewarded by spotting another two female adders sunning it.
Again, one of these was about to shed her skin.
All the adders seen today had a very flattened posture so to as absorb as much heat as possible.
It was very strange that we didn't see any male adders at all!?!?!

Hopefully the male imbalance may be sorted on our next outing?

High Definition images of today's search can be seen here.