Just Hanging Around

Just before the Coronavirus lockdown, I had decided to practice ‘social distancing’ and headed to a remote North Yorkshire site all on my own.

- Jonathan Dent

It was a beautiful sunny day with blue sky, however, a bitter wind prevailed, blowing lines of last autumn’s leaves across the fields. The site is a grass field which I have searched previously but with very little result. The adjacent fields had revealed a couple of Roman coins, including a Republican issue (Fig.1) and a finger ring (Fig.2) as well as a nice hammered coin of Charles I (Fig.3), so I had thought that this field would do the same.

For some unexplained reason, I had this strange feeling about the field too, that there was something good to be found there and that’s why I was returning to it on this trip. The short journey added to the atmosphere as unusually I only passed a few cars. I parked up and looked out across the fields and for a second or two pondered the possibility of going over to where the Roman coins had been found. Nope, I had set out on a mission and I was sticking with it so I grabbed my Minelab Equinox 800 and a bag containing some sandwiches and a flask of tea and set off.

Crikey it was fresh and my eyes were watering badly in the chilly wind. A few pigeons exploded from out of a bush and I spotted some male pheasants getting all cocky as they do at this time of year, both signs that no one had passed this way recently. I got to the far side of the field, walked along the grassy edge, and set up base camp behind a thick clump of brambles.

After a few hours, it seemed the field wasn’t going to budge from its established, rather mean status – a pocketful of Georgian buttons and scraps of old white lead was my only reward. The white lead looked to be Roman in origin but nothing else from that period was in evidence.