Welcome to Dig Regardless, a blog about my mudlarking and metal detecting exploits, the diary entries and stories of how my finds were made, beside my thoughts and opinions on the politics that surround the activities of 'treasure hunting' and its ramifications upon our knowledge of the past.
I am 'lucky.' I've always possessed a natural ability to stumble upon things, for instance, finding banknotes in the street, and in the most unlikely of places, and I do find them on a regular basis, indeed I have come across a hundred pounds or so in separate individual finds of various denominations in the last year alone.
At the the age of thirteen, I found a whole wage packet floating in the sea containing a family's livings - unfortunately these were the days when wages were paid in cash in a plan brown envelope and it contained nothing more than banknotes, not even a name on the label to aid identification of the loser. Once I saw a fiver floating in the breeze ten feet above my head and caught it before it hit the ground, another time I spied a roll of banknotes drifting across a car park like a lone tumbleweed in a Western - ninety pounds in total.
I've noticed that not everybody possesses these nostrils for good fortune, because no-one else in my family of four has found ever a single note, and often I've come across them, right under their very noses. I doubt this ability will ever desert me.
Of course this process of loss (and gain!) has been going on for the entire history of human life and in every conceivable place - people losing or misplacing their precious earnings and possessions through accident, misfortune or death, only for some person at a later date, be that the very next day or in a thousand years time, to find them and possess them once more.
I am 'lucky.' I've always possessed a natural ability to stumble upon things, for instance, finding banknotes in the street, and in the most unlikely of places, and I do find them on a regular basis, indeed I have come across a hundred pounds or so in separate individual finds of various denominations in the last year alone.
At the the age of thirteen, I found a whole wage packet floating in the sea containing a family's livings - unfortunately these were the days when wages were paid in cash in a plan brown envelope and it contained nothing more than banknotes, not even a name on the label to aid identification of the loser. Once I saw a fiver floating in the breeze ten feet above my head and caught it before it hit the ground, another time I spied a roll of banknotes drifting across a car park like a lone tumbleweed in a Western - ninety pounds in total.
I've noticed that not everybody possesses these nostrils for good fortune, because no-one else in my family of four has found ever a single note, and often I've come across them, right under their very noses. I doubt this ability will ever desert me.
Of course this process of loss (and gain!) has been going on for the entire history of human life and in every conceivable place - people losing or misplacing their precious earnings and possessions through accident, misfortune or death, only for some person at a later date, be that the very next day or in a thousand years time, to find them and possess them once more.
Dig Regardless is all about my less fortuitous and more determined efforts to find what treasures lie beneath the history-laced land surface of the UK. Here you'll find a myriad fascinating things wrought of stone or leather, the basest and most noble of metals, pottery, antler, wood and bone. The fripperies of fashion, the most mundane of quotidian objects, the art of the Medieval goldsmith, the craft of the Paleolithic stone knapper, and a thousand other things.
It will serve as a more rounded, accurate and fulfilling way of recording the instances of these finds than can ever be provided by services such as Museums, the Portable Antiquities Scheme or UKDFD who must only concentrate upon the dry particulars of each find they record. Here you will find the whole unexpurgated story of each discovery with my findings and opinions open to public scrutiny and comment.
Thanks,
Jeff Hatt
Jeff Hatt
I enjoyed reading through your blog Jeff. It’s nice to see a fellow detectorist who has a passion for the history behind the objects discovered.
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