Every Field Has A Story

Over time it has become apparent to me that every field has a story, on the surface they may all look the same, some might even look totally identical to each other. But as we know it's what's below the surface that tells the real story. People that don't metal-detect have very little concept of this and find it hard to believe that so many treasures can be sitting inches away from the soles of their shoes. When/if I'm lucky enough to score a new permission I try to find out as much off the farmer or landowner as possible, along with that I'll research the land or the history of the county that the ground is located in. Any morsel of information can give me a head start on how I want to approach hunting the land. 

"I currently use an Equinox 800 for all my hunting apart from on the River Thames. I plan to write a blog about my experience with the 800 and the process I went through to learn it, that can wait until a later date."

Because the Equinox 800 is such a versatile machine you can literally set it up for any given hunting situation, any clues off of the farmer and landowner that I manage to get, help me to understand how I should set my detector up for maximum performance. The image below shows one of my permissions, it's part of over 200 acres of land, I call it the well field because it has an old well in the bottom corner. Out of the whole 200 acres this is the one field that has been completely left alone, it hasn't been ploughed or turned to pasture, apart from some cows grazing and the odd cutting of the grass its still in its original state. Once I found all this out it then allowed me to build a picture in my mind on how I wanted to approach it.

The Well Field

Because the grass was so long my initial hunts were concentrated around the perimeter of the field, I was using my 6’ inch minelab coil because it's easier to swing in the longer grass, initially I was only going to dig the obvious targets that hit in all directions, I could refine my hunting style once I'd uncovered some clues. On my first few sessions I managed to find some nice buttons, a horseshoe and a few old coins. These finds alone indicated early to me that the field was going to contain some interesting treasures, the buttons that I dug were all about 9’ inches down so I had no doubt in my mind that some targets were going to be of a similar depth or maybe deeper. I will keep a record of future hunts but this blog isn’t specifically about results and finds. The other fields on this permission are all pasture, most use to be ploughed and then got turned into pasture. This told me that targets were going to be relatively shallow, because top soil was added there was a very high chance that a lot of trash items where going to be mixed in with the good stuff. Shallow trash could mask deeper targets so I knew that I was going to have to start to clear all the shallow signals first. This was going to be a very long term approach, I wasn't going to rush this process, it was going to require a different mindset to the well field. I knew I was going to be digging loads of trash to get to the treasure, but …. Hey!! trash is all part of metal detecting. In this specific detecting situation I was going to need to up my recovery speed so I got both faster and clearer separation on all targets - “this will be explained in my blog about the Equinox 800”.  

Naval Button

In regards to fields and their stories, some are easy to read and have been left untampered, others have been made a little more complicated, having been jumbled up or partially obscured and mixed up by trash, but as a detectorist it's our job to piece it altogether.  As mentioned before, no field is the same, now, due to the time of the year with many fields having been harvested and ploughed, this makes the idea of piecing together all these stories way more easier, half the job has been done for us. The plough obviously brings a vast majority of the targets nearer to the surface, this allows us to uncover the clues at a faster pace, we can then start to understand what might of taken place on the specific piece of land we're hunting on. Below is an image of a permission that I call "The D-Day Field", I call it this because it came to my attention that many of the soldiers that went off to the D-Day landings trained in this field prior to getting shipped out. I managed to pull nearly 86 buttons in two days from this land, many were naval and military, it was a profound feeling handling something that was once attached to the clothing of someone that most probably died in the war. It was as if the silence within these fields conveyed that haunting quiet once all the artillery had stopped, and the souls of those that died somehow managed to find their way back to wander these ploughed landscapes forevermore. 

D Day Field

 

To finish I’ll use two examples of pieces of land where the story is constantly getting rewritten, that’s on both the River Thames and other detectable foreshores. Because the tide is forever coming in and out, this gives the opportunity for the landscapes to change and in doing so the trash and the treasure has a good chance of evolving and replenishing. I call the River Thames detecting experience a “trial by fire” because if there’s one way to learn your machines, it’s on the banks of the Thames. There are literally hundreds of targets littered everywhere, not only have you got to be persistent but you’ve got to be prepared to dig an awful lot of trash to get the odd bit of treasure. I use my Fisher F19 for Thames hunting, it’s not as versatile as the Equinox 800 but with its super fast recovery speed and solid VDI numbers, it’s a beast of a machine for that type of hunting. The banks of the Crown Estate Foreshore are similar to the Thames as in it’s a tidal environment but there’s far less trash items on the specific stretch I visit, the ground is relatively quiet. On these types of places I like to use a lower recovery speed and scan the ground carefully with a slow swing speed. I’m not concerned about fast target separation when the ground is quiet and the signals are more spaced out.

Peninsular 

So to some up, understanding the land you hunt on is important for a number of reasons, the most important one for me is trying to stitch the story together, when I start to find a few coins then my mind starts racing. When were they dropped and by who? were they rich or poor? were they sad or happy? when I retrieve these items from the ground it's as if I'm preserving a memory, saving a fragment of someone else's life. There's something magic about detecting, especially if you connect with the land you're searching on, for me The Well field is the place I love to spend my time, it's rewarded me with so much. It's atmosphere is somewhat haunting and when I'm detecting as the sun starts to fade and the mist starts to rise, it's a if all those souls that once wandered there are coming back to pay me a visit. Maybe they want their possessions back.

There's No Better Place