Greeting from far away. I've been on the field about 15 minutes when the first good signal comes. I'm thinking it's some trash but I know I got to dig it. You can never tell until you dig it as the saying goes. A single dig with the spade and whatever gave the signal is out of the ground. It takes a little longer to locate it and at first I'm a bit discouraged. It looks like a bit of modern tin. Trash. Then I take a closer look... I'm on a field next to a church. A quite ordinary church by Danish standards. When it was built in the 12th century there was a village nearby but for centuries the church has been in the middle of nowhere. When and why the village disappeared nobody knows. For some weeks I've tried to shed light on the story with my X-TERRA 70. The field I'm walking this Sunday afternoon has given some good finds. Spindle whorls and brooches dating to the Migration Period and Viking Era for sure shows I'm on the right track. About a mile from the church a river runs. I can see a church on the high grounds on the other side of it. The river is wide and deep as it approaches the sea just a few miles further down stream. A Viking ship could easily have sailed even further inland. Some would have traveled far, trading and plundering. And brought back objects from far, far away. Now I hold one of these objects in my hand. Not from Christian Europe surrounding pagan Denmark at the time but from the Islamic civilization. A dirham, a hammered coin minted back in the late 9th century with inscription in kufic script. It's broken but apart from that it looks brand new. Amazing. It must have passed the hands of countless persons before it ended up in Denmark. And then spent roughly 1000 years in the ground. As goes on detecting I'm smiling as a maniac. Just before I turned the detector on that day I thought to myself: “Would be really nice with an old coin. It's really the only thing missing among the finds from here”. Now I got it. Jakob Øhlenschlæger - Denmark