The Benington Hoard

Last year I started walking our dog Zeus out along the marshy areas where I live. As far as I know the area wasn’t a bombing range or anything of particular significance, but there were plenty of bits of old metal scattered about from previous times. Seeing what was lying about on the surface definitely got me rather more interested in what might lie just below it.

- Simon Grant

One afternoon I dug up what turned out to be 25 unexploded German 18lb shrapnel shells. I immediately marked the area and later was able to guide an EOD bomb disposal squad straight to them. The Coastguard official stated that although I was welcome to carry on searching the same area, he would in fact prefer that I didn’t. So I would have to find some new and hopefully somewhat safer pastures to gain experience on.

I gained one particularly interesting permission for some land very near to an old castle in Lincolnshire, and set out to search it. Despite wondering whether the Excalibur was perhaps the best detector for using inland, I did find my first hammered coin and a gold guinea with it. After some advice and seeing the results from a colleague who owned an XP Deus, I decided to change to the Deus as well. Initially, I didn’t get on very well with it, digging up rather too much iron and coke. However, I persevered and gradually mastered the intricacies of my new machine. I found that the Deus was absolutely excellent on those softer signal smaller targets.

By the end of the year I had a few more hammered, and had even found a Celtic full gold stater on a group dig. Of course, when I go out, I am often still accompanied by the ever faithful Zeus.

This year I commenced detecting in mid-January and started finding several more hammered coins for my efforts. I then updated my Deus to V4 and set myself a goal of finding 100 hammered coins by the end of the year.