Detecting the Woods in England

Derek and I are just back from several days detecting in an English woodland, and let’s just say it was worth the trip (it’s a five hour drive). We always jump at any opportunity to detect in England as the finds there are more prolific and there is always a chance of ancient Roman finds, which are few and far between in Scotland.  On top of all that, the weather is better and it was a chance to meet up with new detectorists and chat about our previous discoveries and of course, our Minelab machines!

After arriving on site, we set about detecting in the woods. Now, if you’ve never detected in a dense woodland before, here are a few tips: if you own a CTX 3030-using the GPS function, mark where your vehicle is parked as your first find spot as this will ensure you make it back to your car safely as it can be very difficult to do so once you are in the woods with no visible path; always cover yourself with bug spray and plenty of it, and carry a sturdy spade and a serrated digging tool to get through tree roots if you need to.

Derek and I were both using the CTX 3030 on our first search, and had the machines set up with no discrimination, 35 ferrous tones, ground-coin target separation due to the mineralisation, and auto sensitivity +3. Although this set up can give you a huge range of signals, we both like hearing everything that is in the ground on a new site, even the iron (especially on a Roman site). Pretty soon it became clear, the woodland had been used extensively for hunting during the last couple of centuries, and we dug a large amount of shot gun cartridges - these signals are very similar to small bronze coins or artefacts, so you have to dig them, especially as we were searching on a proven Roman site that had already produced Roman brooches and coins! The site lived up to its hunting heritage and produced a wide range of spent munitions including; lead musket balls, 22 calibre lead rounds and copper cartridges, lead buckshot, blank 303 copper cartridges and some live ammunition in the shape of a 9 millimetre pistol round. You should always be aware that when searching in woods you can potentially dig live ammunition.

As well as all the munitions there was also a wide selection of other ferrous and non-ferrous targets within the woods, such as buttons, buckles, nails, and assorted modern dross.

Within an hour of searching, we each had a couple of small roman coins called minims. These are very small coins, about the size of a dime, or smaller, and although they were the lowest value of coins used in Roman Britain, we were both delighted with the finds - just think, the last person to hold those coins was most probably a Roman soldier stationed in England around 1,700 years ago. We proceeded to find a couple more low denomination Roman bronze coins, some of which were in remarkably good condition. 

We went back to the site for another 3 days and we continued to pull out Roman relics and coins. As the soil was heavily mineralised Derek had decided to swop over to the GPX 5000 pulse machine. He tuned it to the site conditions by burying a Roman coin from the previous days search and fine tuning the settings to get the best possible signal response and he only started his search when he could find the tiny Roman minim buried at around 12 inches. It soon became pretty obvious that the GPX 5000 was making a huge difference to our finds rate. He was searching in an area that had been really well covered by dozens of detectorists over the previous few days, but by the end of the hunt he’d pulled up two lovely brooches, a ring, a hair pin and the back of a seal box, all lovely Roman artefacts dating from the first to the third century AD. It is thought seal boxes were used for sealing writing tablets, which were probably placed in bundles and bagged. The bags cords were then passed through the holes in the seal box and knotted within the box. The box was then filled with wax and the lid shut, thus securing the parcel with the seal having to be broken to get at the contents. There is no categorical archaeological evidence for this, although many seal boxes are found in areas where there was a high level of military occupation, and the military used message tablets for both mail and dispatches. 

So Derek had a wonderful day of detecting, me, not so much with six shotgun cartridges, but I did manage a pretty cool Roman spindle whorl, which is a conical lead weight placed at the end of a wooden spindle that is then used for spinning sheep wool into yarn.

On the last day, I was determined to find a Roman brooch as it has been on my wish list since I started detecting. I was keeping the search coil low and slow, listening for the slightest hint of a good signal, as the easy and shallow targets had all been removed from the area by the detectorists who had searched it extensively for the last week. I had just finished digging yet another shotgun cartridge when I fixed onto my next target. Another scratchy signal that sounded identical to the previous shot gun cartridge, but as we say, ‘It’s just one more hole,’ (Neither of us ever walk away from any positive signal, regardless of how scratchy it is, as you just never know what that target could be). To my surprise and delight, it was a 1,800 year old Roman trumpet brooch in great condition. I could not believe that I had finally found one and I spent the rest of the day grinning and looking at my ancient treasure.

In conclusion, digging in a forest offers a different detecting experience and sometimes quite a challenging search environment, but for us, it was definitely worth it and we can’t wait to experience it again. 

You can keep up-to-date with Beyond the Beep on our Facebook page, www.facebook.com/beyondthebeep and you can read all about our finds on www.beyondthebeep.com.