Pineapple Feathers

Freddy carrying a brick in his mouth that he'd picked up in the stream at the bottom of the field.  Molly is still down there looking for one of her own. Quite why my dogs love to pull stones and bricks out of rivers I do not know but they take it very seriously! When I eventually reached the bottom of the field myself, the ground was strewn with them.

Another solo mission yesterday afternoon and on a different field than before. Time slot there was three hours and I decided that I would measure my recovery rate. I dug a total of 90 signals of which 15 were worthwhile finds, a few large chunks of iron, some shrapnel and the rest the scrap aluminium which seems to litter all of these fields. How it got to be there is now obvious to me because there are no specific concentrations of it and only an even spread that extends pretty much everywhere — therefore it was thrown out in muck-spreading operations. 

I still have to get to the bottom of the mystery of the IKEA cam locks of which we've now found five...

Thirty recoveries per-hour is good going. On my best Medieval fields down in Essex, I'd be lucky to get thirty in a full session of six hours! Mind you, out of those thirty a good hammered coin was always likely and a few artefacts inevitable. 

I've already decided that the first field we searched was probably lawned at some point and saw light activity during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The mix of coinage found there was just what I'd expect from parkland. This new field showed a typical mix of finds that was the same as I'd expect from any random arable field, anywhere — a few 18th century tombac buttons, what I think is a uniface jetton, a harness stud, a hollow pewter item that is probably from a flagon or similar, an oil lamp wick winder, and a heavy bronze vessel handle fragment. 

Only when I reached the bottom of the field did I find anything out of the ordinary run of things. Firstly, a large silver coin that appeared from the ground reverse side up. Obscured by adhering soil, the design could have been that of any milled silver coin from the 1690's until the early 20th Century. It was one of the latest! An Edward V florin. 

A few minutes later another circular coin-like object appeared and without reading-glasses, just for a second, I thought it was a Roman siliqua. With reading-glasses, it was apparent that it was not one of those but rather a lead button with a curious design upon its face...

A pineapple? An upside-down pineapple with Prince of Wales feathers atop it? 

Whatever it was, I liked it!