Back in early April 2016 I had a telephone call from my colleague, Julian Evan-Hart, who, rather excitedly, told me that a field neighbouring one he’d been detecting on for several weeks had become available. He’d already found a considerable number of medieval hammered coins and artefacts on the first field and felt pretty confident that this field could yield similar finds. None of us had ever detected on this new field previously, so the invitation to join him was eagerly accepted.

A Roman road runs through these fields, before it intersects with three others just a few hundred yards away. The fields at the junction had yielded a profuse number of Roman coins and artefacts when we first began detecting them about 20 years ago. Sadly, these days the pickings are becoming scarce. This is due to over-detecting as well as new farming methods, which no longer see the fields being ploughed very deeply, if at all.

We arrived at the field on a cool April afternoon and began searching, Julian with his CTX 3030, and me with my Minelab Safari. At first the signs didn’t look good, we had barely any finds for the first 20 minutes, or so. As we made our way further across the field, however, I had a very strong signal.

The field was harrowed, and quite lumpy, but not difficult to dig. I dug out the first target to find a large square shaped lump of green bronze. I soon recognised it as a medieval cauldron foot (Fig.1). I seem to find one of these every year, so it was added to my collection.

Julian was doing equally as well, with a couple of hammered coins and a few other bits. I moved to where he was detecting in the hope I could find one or two hammered myself, but my next target turned out to be a small medieval buckle (Fig.2).