A Ploughsharing Upon the Berkshire Downs

On Sunday morning we went along to an organised dig in Berkshire. This would be Judy's first taste of an extended period of time spent detecting and I was interested to see how she would cope with a full six-hour session. Mind you, having got back into the swing of things only recently, I was just as interested in seeing how I'd cope because a four-hour stint I find quite tiring at the moment. Though I am slowly building stamina, I cannot imagine how I used to cope with sessions lasting six, eight, nine, ten or even twelve hours in length!

"Youth" you might say?

Pah! I was already over the hill when I began!

We'd arrived at the predetermined destination only to find nobody there! We'd then scratched at our heads awhile and then we'd decided that the participants must have decided against detecting in such an exposed location on such a breezy day. They must have decamped to somewhere less unfriendly nearby, we'd thought. We'd then decided to backtrack up the main road whilst I kept a lookout for a hoard of figures winding their ways across a field. Luckily we'd found them in a set of fields at the next village along.

It seems that I have a Berkshire relative ...

Enough of we'd!

We chose to start in a field by the main road. Nobody else seemed to want to bother with it and were focussed upon the field right next to the village, for obvious reason. All the fields available were under wheat stubble and the stalks, though just three or four inches tall, were pretty stiff. This is not my idea of detecting heaven and in the past, I would never set foot on such a field unless there really were no better options available. There always were — I had three thousand acres of prime and very productive Essex farmland at my disposal back then.

It was tough going. I chose to work the tractor tracks so that I could more easily identify areas that might be worthwhile concentrating upon, but Judy proceeded to skim the stalks from the outset. Both of these approaches had their advantages and disadvantages. My approach meant that digging in such compacted stony ground would be a trial of patience while for Judy, digging in the uncompacted high stubble would be relatively easy by comparison. However, she would sacrifice her finds rate by doing so and limit herself to large and surface objects, but I would be able to locate even the tiniest items and find everything that lay in my path.

After spending four arduous hours in this field we'd had more than enough of it and so we decamped to the village pub for lunch and refreshment where we could share thoughts about our first proper plough experience together, when I could show my finds to Judy and most importantly, I could take a gander at the contents of her bulging finds pouch. 

Although I knew full well that Judy's inexperience meant that under such tough conditions she would locate far fewer positive signals than I — I didn't realise that I would retrieve five times as many non-ferrous items as she ...

This was cause for concern but I really had no idea how to address the issue. I guess that wheat stubble is something that every British detectorist must learn how to cope with but I hadn't banked on such a great discrepancy between our performances. I thought that maybe it was her ADX150 at fault but having already established to my own satisfaction that it is capable of performing just as well (on an average field) as my Laser B1, that thought was put aside. 

I hadn't watched her at work but of course, she had been skimming the top of the stubble and not actually penetrating it very far. She also complained that pinpointing objects would cost her a great deal of time. I asked her how much time on average she thought she'd have to dig in order to locate each signal and she replied  ~

"Maybe five, ten, even fifteen minutes ..." 

She then asked what length of time I would typically spend on digging a target ~

"Uh, about one minute at most unless it's a tiny, tiny thing!"

Two items found within a few feet of each other. On the right is a tiny, tiny thing. To my mind, if a detector fails to locate such items as this then it is useless because at just 11mm diameter this little decorated silver mount is the size of a Saxon sceat or tremissis.  If you look at the picture of my finds from this day then you will see other items that are even smaller than this and one that is just a third of its size. The Laser B1 has no trouble with such scraps of metal. I don't yet know if the XP ADX150 is up to the job. The larger object is a mystery at this moment. It is decorated on both sides with the same design and so it must be part of the handle for something that would be viewed from either direction. Period? Roman or Georgian, I reckon ...  

Now, I had had some trouble with the ADX150 when pinpointing because it has a DD coil while the B1 has a concentric one. They perform very differently, but because I had absolutely no prior experience of using a DD coil, I believed it would work just like a concentric one. You know — it would be exactly on spot every time. It wasn't. Compared to the absolute precision with which the B1 pinpoints targets, the position of the target given by the 150 always seemed uncertain. I had to see a diagram of its search pattern in order to understand why so often I would begin to dig in the wrong place and waste a lot of time by doing so. 

Aahh! The sweet, sweet smell of freedom from toil!

After lunch, we moved to another field that had been released around mid-afternoon. People had already come, tried and gone. We met a fella on his way out who'd dug just two signals in an hour! However, this field was perfect because although it would prove to be almost completely devoid of finds it was almost completely clear of stubble and so I could watch Judy at work on a dead flat surface.

She began by swinging the coil upwards at the end of every pass — bad girl!

This was soon corrected and then she enjoyed a happy couple of hours under very little physical strain and actually outperformed me by finding three .303 bullets to my one shirt button (a Birmingham branded example no less!) which I thought odd, because earlier I'd found six spent .303 shell casings in the field just across the road ...

Had they fired at targets placed in this field and through passing traffic, I wondered?

She even seemed to have mastered pinpointing by close of play. By walking about the signal in all directions she managed to locate the true centre of the signal and thereby spent a great deal less time than she previously had in the necessary job of retrieving her targets quickly. This lesson taught me something important ...

But at the very last — I outclassed her when I found what I believe may be the first two objects from a significant hoard of the same because they were both located within just a few feet of each other ...