Purse Spill Or Hoard?

Myself and my friend, Paul, have a lovely little summer permission that we detect together.

- Gary Smith

Its permanent pasture, so we leave it mainly for the summertime when our other farmland is out of bounds. There aren’t lots of signals around, and to be fair, most of the land has never been plowed, but it does give us somewhere to go in those hard times.

When I have land which hasn’t been plowed for a long time (or not at all), I switch my Deus into the deep search mode (Program 6) – a very simple two-tone program with ferrous or nonferrous target identification. On this occasion I was using the 11-inch X35 coil, 11.6kHz, Sensitivity 92 and ground balance 86. Sometimes I can go ages without a signal, so patience is essential on this type of land.

On this particular day, I headed up the side of one of the fields and had a cracking little signal, dug a plug out and to my amazement found a little Edward I hammered penny sat there looking at me (Fig.1). Wow, was I happy! I even gave a wave to Paul who was over on the other side of the field? I checked my hole again, then took a step forward and got another signal. Once again, I dug a plug and found another Edward penny. I began to wonder whether I had stumbled across a hoard, or was it just a couple of casual losses? I started a general search pattern around the immediate area and discovered several more signals.