All of my local permissions for the last few years have been pasture and I've had plenty of nice and interesting finds from them, a few hammies, a few Roman, a couple of Saxon brooches, even a very nice papal bulla, but mainly Victorian stuff. Fairly recently I also gained a local stubble field which is proving to be quite interesting. Targets are relatively few but even so I still don't believe that it has ever been detected before, I just think that it has escaped having night soil and much trash dumped on it, so maybe kind of like a snapshot in time of the Georgian farm?
It's about 30 acres but the current 6” of dense stubble makes it quite limiting so I've only really had about 2 acres of it to go at for now. There's been quite a few crusty Georgian coins so far as to be expected but also some pretty decent older finds spanning a good date range.
This is just the order in which they were found.
A copper/alloy vessel leg.
A Queen Mary groat of 1553/4.
A James I half groat of 1604.
A King John penny 1199 – 1216.
A Henry III penny 1216 – 1272.
A lead hornbook of 1500 – 1633, found as two separate targets apart.
A lead/alloy bust item?
A lead/alloy sundialish type item?
Hopefully some more similar finds will show from the remaining 28 acres of it when the stubble is gone or at least breaks down more? The above finds have all been at least 30m apart. One area was full of pre-decimal pennies and a few weights. It's just a really nice untrashy project which the landowner (not a farmer) plans to put back to pasture soon, he has strong family connections with this particular locality and even plans to re-install the original field boundaries from the historic maps that I have provided. I think that when it's ploughed and harrowed then field walking could be quite interesting?
I'll add any other interesting finds from it here.
