Well its mid December 2012 and the good old United Kingdom is on the receiving end of a real icy blast. Temperatures at night are dropping to -10-15 and for us here that's cold.
One Wednesday morning mid this icy blast I had a day off work, sadly none of my colleagues did. So I pondered what to do with this day on my own... and within a milli-second had decided to go detecting with the CTX 3030.
Half an hour later I was on one of my usual haunts a field that yields finds from all ages. The only trouble was this was going to be at least my thirtieth visit to such and although I knew in advance I was going to enjoy it I did wonder what, if much at all would be recovered.
Blimey it certainly was cold lucky I had about nine layers on giving me the appearance of a Michelin Man, so what... at least I was warm.
The first hour was indeed a bit slow, but the second hour was surprisingly packed with finds... for some strange reason I seemed to be getting much deeper signals than usual in the frozen solid soil, brilliant in most ways, but not when you recover a Coke can... of which I did several in fact. But any one of these old cans could have been a hoard... However these modern blights were more than easily made up for with the many finds of interest. These included various coins including two silver, a Victorian brooch with a bird design (blimey did think this was Roman when I first glimpsed it) some buckles and a late Saxon fitting with gilded recess.
This last find was found in two pieces about five feet apart despite the object having been broken some considerable time ago. Funny I didn't seem to feel the cold anymore. The CTX 3030 finds rate had warmed me up.
I ended the day with a veritable bag full of finds some of the ones I made during the latter part of this search included part of a highly decorated 18th Century shoe buckle a Crotal Bell another large Mediaeval buckle and some Georgian buttons of considerable size and located at the same category of depth.
Then as I was considering leaving the sun actually came out in some strength and started to melt the frost encrusted trees... as for me, well I was considerably warmed up anyway by the amount of finds I had just made. I hadn't been here for about three weeks, but in that time it had rained a lot and of course soil bound worms had moved a lot of soil bringing a few targets within reach no doubt.
However to be frank all around me it had remained chilly to freezing, but did I feel any of it? not with my good old trusted CTX 3030 I didn't!!! Especially as in total I found three silver coins, the last one being a wonderful Celtic silver unit... but the finding of that is for another account another day.
Julian Evan-Hart
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