Last week I had a bit of spare time after finishing work. I arranged to meet a detecting buddy, Brian, for a quick detecting session on one of my fields. The field has produced a few medieval hammered coins and some nice artifacts in the past so we were hopeful that something would come up in the short time we had.
The weather was fine and the ground was quite dry so we took my jeep to the field to save time. We arrived, had a quick chat, wished each other luck and then headed off to see what we could find. The stubble is quite long this year so the going was a bit tough. Towards the end of the session we met up to compare finds, a few copper coins, one musket ball and some artifacts but nothing too exciting. I said to Brian that we only had ten minutes left and we set off again ever hopeful that something was going to turn up. I picked a direction and thought I would head off that way for five minutes and then turn and come back. My next signal was an iffy one which was jumping about all over the place, and was showing deep on the E-TRAC screen so I thought it might be deep iron. I decided to dig it anyway though and after a few minutes and about fourteen inches down I caught my first glimpse of the vessel rim, I’ve had a few vessel fragments out of the same field in the past so assumed this was another one. I then cleaned some more soil from around the rim and could see that it extended down a fair bit, my excitement started to build at this point. A few minutes later I had removed the complete vessel form the ground. At this point Brian was making his way over to pack up for the day. As soon as he saw me holding the vessel he came running over to have a look. We now had a quandary, it was time to pack up and leave but the vessel had obviously sustained an impact from the plough at some point and we wanted to have a scan about for the missing parts of the handle, we also decided to have a quick look inside to see if the vessel had been buried empty or not. The soil was quite loose and when we turned the vessel upside down a small group of coins and a ring brooch came out, at this point I decided that we should leave the rest of the contents for the experts to empty. We then had a five minute scan around the area and recovered four pieces of handle and rim which had been broken by the plough.