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OUT
AND ABOUT WITH BRIAN AND Mo’ BY BRIAN
& Mo’ CROSS LOST
MORE THAN WE FOUND! It was only a few weeks after our last trip when the Oxford M/D Club asked us if we could travel down to their club to give them a talk on water searching. It was to be a long way, about 160 miles each way, not something we could do in an evening. The talk was to be on a Tuesday, but the club kindly offered us the chance of joining them on their weekly dig on the Sunday, which very conveniently was to be held near a caravan camping site. We left early on the Saturday and had an uneventful journey down to the site. We dropped all the goodies we were to use during the talk at the house of one of the Officers, so that Skidmark would be uncluttered. Arriving at the site we met one of the club members, ‘Bertie Bassett’ and his wife Teresa. That evening was spent chilling out, Mo and myself’ dreaming of the goodies we were to find in this new area of detecting country. “Staters in every field around here”, we kept telling each other.
The day was to be a scorcher. We got back about mid-day to find the club members wandering around the field by the river. Nothing really special had been found, although one detectorist had found three Georgian shillings, one after the other as he headed across the field. We sweated our way around the field and through the first part of the afternoon but only had about four signals between us. Bertie and Teresa surprised us by inviting us into their caravan in mid-afternoon where Teresa had put on a full Sunday dinner. That was fantastic and very much appreciated. After that we were fit for nothing but chatting about detecting. The next day we decided to go to the Ashmolean but after parking Skidmark on the outskirts and travelling into Oxford by bus, we found it closed. It is closed on a Monday. We did our talk that evening. It was great to meet other detectorists whose names we knew but whom we had never met. The following day we got to the Ashmolean and spent a full day in Oxford. It was time to get back to Runcorn.
The cost was very cheap so we decided to go for it. The site would make an ideal base to suss out the area. The fact that we weren’t exactly pensioners didn’t bother us too much, we were sure we would get around that when the time came. As it was I was working on the Friday night when campers were supposed to arrive for the weeks’ festivities. We had no choice but to leave home on the Saturday morning when I arrived home from work. We got to the site mid-afternoon and I promptly dropped us both in it by announcing to the steward, “I’m sorry we’re late but I was on a 12 hour shift last night”. The kick in the shin from Mo’ came too late to stop my informing them we weren’t retired but the steward didn’t seem to take notice. As we settled down to do our research ready for some serious door-knocking, we were constantly being interrupted by the other campers, “We’re having a game of boules in a few minutes, would you like to join us?” and “Do you want to buy some Bingo tickets, we’re having a game after tea?” We’re not the type to be spoilsports but we were on a mission. We were in 'Stater Country' and didn’t want to sit around all day playing silly games. Half an hour after arriving we were setting off again to knock at our first farm door. The campsite was very close to a Roman town with a river running through the town. We chose to call at a farm not too far away after having a quick walk around the town. Unfortunately, this farmer hadn’t got his crops off yet; it was a touch too early. But he did say that we were welcome to come back when the crops were off. The fact that no crops were out yet was going to be a problem, we were sure. But, there was a fair bit of grassland about and much of it had been cut for silage recently, so we could make do with that. We drove to the next village and approached a farmer there. The farmer’s wife, a cross between Attila the Hun and Ivan the Terrible met us at the door. She was so bad-mannered I was surprised that we just didn’t give her a mouthful and then walk away. Farmer’s wives are often a problem when they answer the door instead of the farmer or one of his workers. Whereas a farm worker will simply tell you where he is, the wife will ask questions like, “Who wants to see him?” or “What’s it about?” or worst of all, “I don’t think he’ll be interested!” There’s nothing worse than having to go through all the introductory rigmarole with someone who has already decided that you won’t be walking on HER LAND! Mo’ has already decided that she will be asking the next farmer that refuses us permission, “So, you don’t believe in sharing the countryside with others then?” Whilst on the subject of farmers' wives the following little anecdote should make you smile. A detectorist friend of ours knocked on a farm door early one morning. The wife answered and our friend asked if he could speak to the farmer. “Come in,” she said, “He’ll be back in a little while”. Our friend sat down. The wife told him she was doing breakfast and would he like some? Not wanting to offend, our friend said that he would. Within minutes he was tucking into what can only be described as a “Desperate Dan Brekkie”. Whilst easting she enquired what our friend wanted her husband for. “To ask him permission to search his land with a metal detector” our friend replied trying not to expand on the subject with the farmer’s wife. A few minutes later, the farmer walked in. “Who’s this then?” he enquired of his wife. “He wants to use his metal detector here”, the wife told him. “I’ll be having none of that on my land” he replied not even glancing back at our friend. How embarrassing!! Our friend told us he couldn’t finish his breakfast quick enough so that he could make his escape. The farmer never spoke to him once whilst he was there. Anyway, we eventually got to see our farmer. He told us that we could go on two grass fields just outside the village. This would do us we thought, it was somewhere to detect. Twenty minutes later we were on the fields detecting. The first disaster that befell us was when I gingerly touched the electric fence with my stainless steel trowel; there was no current. I told Mo’ it was switched off. She got under it and Pow! She must have touched it with her trowel. Detector, trowel and Mo’ went everywhere. I was called for everything for the next hour or so. These two fields were very similar to barren Cheshire fields in that little came off them that day. We got back to the campsite at 10.30pm to find most of the pensioners in the clubhouse. We joined them and were bored stiff with conversations revolving around gas bottles, electric hook-ups and what so-and-so did after the bar-b-que last year! It was when we got back to Skidmark that Mo’ noticed her gold bracelet was missing. It was one of those that had a habit of coming off when she took off her jacket if she wasn’t paying attention to it. That day she had taken her jacket off twice. Once to try out a coat in a shop and again when we were on the grass field and she had got too hot. She had a feeling that she had lost it on the field. The next day we went straight to the shop to no avail. They insisted it had not been lost there. We went to the fields and spent the rest of the day searching about there and in the adjoining field. The problem with a gold bracelet, even if it is lying on the top as this one would have been, is that it doesn’t give off a very good signal at all. We didn’t find this out till late in the evening when Mo’ put another bracelet on the ground to discover that she could hardly pick it up. By this time, we had been searching all day listening for ‘bangs’. We had probably passed over it and had ignored the faint signal. We decided we had to re-start our search only to see that a herd of cows were now on the field. I wasn't staying there with them on the field and so we had to leave a renewed search until the next day. The next morning we were out fairly early again, leaving the pensioners to their lawn tennis, boules and afternoon naps. We decided to leave the search for the gold bracelet until later in the day and try to find some productive land. This was the second time we had travelled a long way to this area and felt we had to make a start in finding some better land... and some decent finds. We decided that we would seek permission for some grass fields that lay beside the Roman road that ran through the area. Finding the farmer proved difficult and it was some hours later when we finally gained permission to search three large grass fields on the farm. Unfortunately what looked like short grass from the main road turned out to be over one foot long. It was workable but only just. The first field produced a mass of finds from a search lasting several hours but not a single thing was of any age. We decided to try the next field. To get to this we deduced that we should walk through a yard where waste silage was stacked and then climb over a wire fence. As we got halfway through the yard we found the floor covered in cow poo, that got deeper and deeper. When we got to the fence it was almost up to the tops of our wellies and it was going to be difficult to get over it without having an accident. The fence looked electric. I tentatively touched it with my stainless trowel and felt just a slight tingling. “It’s OK” I told Mo’, “it must be a dead low current. I can just about feel something”. Holding the strands of the fence apart with my trowel I allowed Mo’ to get through. Mo’ then went to do the same for me and “BANG” she got another big electric shock. We were just grateful she didn’t fall back into the mess. Talk about moan, for the next half hour she accused me of trying to get rid of her, jokingly of course. We weren't having a good time at that present moment especially with Mo' not having found the gold bracelet yet. We had problems on this field because of the long grass and the electric fences. But we did start to find some Roman bronze coins. Mo’ found three in one area. These are shown in Fig1. In all we found about seven Roman coins but the condition of them all was terrible. In the early evening we went back to the field where Mo’ lost the bracelet but it didn’t turn up. But we did find the late 16th century buckle shown in Fig 2. That night we drank at the club again deciding to sit with a few of the locals and not the old campers. We pick up a few snippets of useful info, including the details of where Roman coins had been found some years ago. The next day we drove around a bit looking at fields where locals had told us we should try. The problem was some of the fields were recreation fields, others were barren, devoid of crop, maybe having been set-aside for building. The locals sometimes forget the fact that you need to have permission to search or that you can only search certain types of ground e.g. farmland. They say coins have been rumoured to have been found years ago on so-and-so piece of ground. When you ask if they know who owns it they often turn around and say something like, “Oh, you can go on there, no-one uses it”
We chilled out quite a bit that day, ending the day with a search on the ‘lost bracelet’ fields coming off with just a few Georgian coins. The next day we decided to try to find out who owned the two large grass fields just on the main Roman road, right beside where the Roman town was reputed to have been situated. We had ogled these fields since we had arrived and thought we’d go for it that day. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. We got permission after tracking down the farmer. We commended ourselves on the fact that so far we had gained three out of the three farms we had approached. We walked out of the farmyard and both gave out a ‘Yes’ yell. These were surely to be the productive fields we had been searching for. We had only been on these two large fields for a few hours when we came to the conclusion that something was wrong. We were digging up an unusual amount of modern rubbish with not a single sign of anything old. During a break a little while later Mo’ got talking to one of the locals who told her that during most winter months the fields we were on were under WATER! quite deep water at that. We plodded on for a few more hours but eventually gave up the search. For the remaining few days our activities followed much the same. We got permission to search another farm and got refused at another, where a woman slammed the door in our face as soon as we introduced ourselves. Mo' didn't get the chance to try her 'Not sharing the countryside spiel'. We found nothing of note and were beginning to feel that maybe this wasn’t the land of ‘Golden Staters’ and that we should have gone back to our old stomping grounds, after all we had travelled almost 700 miles to find seven grotty Roman coins! and lose a solid gold bracelet to boot! We were certainly very much out of pocket. It was definitely a case of 'We've come back with less than we started', very unusual for detectorists. We were actually back in Oxfordshire just a week later to meet up with Mike Chambers and ‘Colonial Cousin’ who had an article in The Searcher recently. Mo’ made some particularly good finds and we will cover that trip in the article. This article and the coming basically brings us up-to-date. At present fields all over the country are flooded and detecting seems to have come to a full stop although we will probably gain from it if the rain stops as many farmers have not been able to seed the fields before winter crept in. We managed a two day trip to the York area but picked up just one coin, the broken hammered shown in Fig 3a & 3b, found by Mo'. Our club, the South-Lancs & Cheshire had a few rallies and we went on a couple of other local rallies. We made a few finds on these rallies they are listed as follows:
We hope to report back to you all as soon as the fields start drying out. Good Hunting |
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