Polly's Parlour — Engraved Silver Plaque of Britannia Pier, Great Yarmouth. 1858-99

Engraved silver plaque — Britannia Pier, Great Yarmouth, circa 1858-99.  34 mm. 

The engraved oval-shaped silver plaque that was discovered a couple of days ago has turned out to be very interesting. As you can see by the inscription at the top, the scene is of 'Britannia Pier' which is located in Great Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast. The pier opened to the public in 1858, was reduced in length by a ship collision one year later and was storm damaged in 1869. It was finally demolished in 1899 and its replacement built 1900. This later pier suffered a sequence of catastrophic fires - on no less than four occasions destroying the successive grand pavilions and ballrooms. This is a pier with a chequered history, however, it still remains in Yarmouth to this day. 

The plaque is a scene of the original pier and so it dates between 1858 and 1899. It compares very well to a contemporary photograph taken from a similar viewpoint (above) and may predate it because the gaslamp was not depicted with its surrounding ring of iron railing (and nor with its cap!). 

This is not by the hand of a trained artist but rather an amateur enthusiast or a perhaps a Yarmouth souvenir maker. Albeit naive, it is nevertheless charming. I think there may be two figures depicted and if so then the one in the foreground even seems to have its own shadow. There are also a series of feint gridlike striations in the background that may have been an attempt at depicting a ship's rigging, but may simply be damage incurred in use. It's hard to tell. 

Also, it is worth mentioning that the plaque blank itself was crudely fashioned because it is covered in small indentations and seems to have been formed by hammering. I do not think it was engraved upon a piece of manufactured sheet silver - perhaps a worn sixpence or shilling was pressed into service for the piece? And what is it from? At this moment I do not know exactly but I reckon it hails from a small wooden box or pocket case and was held in place with probably a mastic because there are no signs of attachment upon the reverse side. 

However, the find is only a couple of days out of the ground. Time will tell!

Polly's Parlour — A Brace of Silver and a Blue Coat Button

There are three arable fields on the new patch and two have been searched enough to give a sense of how productive they might be in the future. Field 1 I think to be no good for much, but of course, you must never write a field off too early because any field may produce something special given time. Field 2 looks more promising and has produced already an item that dates probably to the sixteenth-century, which is by far the earliest find yet made.

Today I visited field 3 expecting to be just like field 2 because they abutt each, and in many ways it was. I encountered the very same spread of aluminium trash wherever I went together with the occasional chunk of anti-aircraft shrapnel — and this is clearly something that we will have to endure for so long as we search this patch of land.

I recieved a soft wide signal that just kept growing in size and scale and loudness as I continued to dig down and down in ever-widening circles. You have to keep going — such a thing might well be a hoard or a bronze helmet or a sword, or just about anything truly fabulous! 

I finally found the object on the top of the subsoil at about fourteen inches and it looked like bronze so I was very careful about extracting it. Unfortunately, as with most signals that go so very deep, it was disappointing. What it was I had absolutely no idea ... apart from the fact that it was certainly rubbish!

Later the ground gave up something better in the form of a silver buckle ring. It was broken but is repairable and it probably dates to the latter part of the nineteenth century. When I get the time I'll research the hallmarks and the maker's mark and give it a firm date and origin.

I'm always pleased to find finger rings and anything made of silver is always a bonus. The next find was very interesting indeed, and again of silver. An oval plaque that when wiped with a finger showed a hand-engraved scene and at the top —an inscription. More food for thought! And more research work for my busy digits!

There were a few more finds of interest to come. A lead loom weight, three shirt buttons, a crusty penny, a brooch that has seen better days but is something that originated from a Victorian church in our village - Salem Baptist. And then a small button that I reckon dates to the early nineteenth-century and is of the 'Birmingham Blue Coat School'.

My aim for any day's detecting is to come home with one decent artefact and one nice inscribed object be it coin, button or whatever. So, all in all, these two short hours were very well spent in my opinion.

Lead Cloth Seals — Augsburg, Germany, with Pine Cone Heraldic Badge. 1500-1650.

Lead cloth seal— Augsburg, Germany, with pine
cone heraldic badge. 1500-1650.  18mm.

The little coin-like object that at first, I believed was a button, on closer inspection turned out to be a cloth seal — what I thought was a crumpled and compressed loop on the reverse was actually a letter 'A' with a crooked bar. 

What could be more Post-Medieval than that? 

I thought that it might take some time to research, but I could not have been more wrong. I asked Judy to Google 'lead cloth seal' just so that she could understand what such a thing was used for and what they looked like in general, and hey presto! 

There it was! Another example! City of Augsburg, Germany!

Arms of Augsburg

I love lead finds when they carry interesting designs. I had this down as a pineapple but it's not one of those - it's a pine cone - and what I believed might be Prince of Wales feathers on top, just a very stylised interpretation of the capital of a column. I also had the whole design upside down in my head. The pine cone is supposed to be viewed upright.

Judy loves it. She has already begun to construct the story that lies behind its presence in our fields. 

That's what finds are for, surely? They are food for the imagination.



References
https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/717337
https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/778443
https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/589636
https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/882758
https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/233781

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!

Don't Mention the 'L' Word

Are you lucky,  or what?

Judy's technique improves swiftly, I must say! She's a willing student and I'm intent upon driving home the fine points of good practise, but of course, at this time there's a very large discrepancy between our abilities in the matters of locating, digging, isolating and pocketing targets at speed.

When I returned from a solo mission on the field that she had worked the evening before, she was astonished that during the same time slot of an hour and a half, I'd returned home with no less than eight items worth keeping compared to her total of just one... which she promptly lost!

"Jeff, how could you have been so lucky?"

"Judy, banish that word from your lips right now!"

"Which word?"

"The 'L' word! This is never a matter of that, and if you ever start believing that it is, then you will begin to fail. Once upon a time I did this every day of the week that I could spare and did it for fifteen years continuously. Let me tell you this — the 'L' word does not enter into it — detecting is simply a game of numbers. The only reason that I found more than you is that I dug more than you, and probably in the order of five times as much!"

Edward VII half penny 1907, General Service button 1902-52, lead token, 'Land of Leather' brass tag - 1990's. Napoleon III 5 centime 1856, Part of an 18th-century shoe buckle, George III cartwheel penny, racing pigeon ring 2002, and the worst find of the day... some kind of trashy aluminium finger ring that when dug looked as if it was made of silver.

Of course, this happens to be true. I recover items quickly because I know that these barley fields will close come sowing time and will not open again till this time next year. I want a clear picture of what their potential might be by then and so I want to uncover as much information as I can in the time available this season. It is a brief window of opportunity that cannot be frittered away upon delays.

Time flies!

However, I do not fly across a field blindly thrashing away at the job.  I'll walk slowly and detect lowly, dig swiftly and accurately and isolate an item from the soil by rapid division of the clump that it resides within. With wide overlapping swings of the coil that do not rise above the ground at their extremities, I just don't miss anything in my path. I will also dig 'iffy' signals that others might consider not worthwhile simply because so many in the past had turned out to be positive once a few inches of surface soil had been removed...

Hence the title of this blog... 

Judy cannot hope to match such speed in the short term and should not even try to. Bad habits are so easy to acquire but are so very hard to eliminate later and so for the time being she must endeavour to perfect good technique - and take her time over it. If so, then surely the finds will come for her!

Those People of Our Past & Us Detectorists of Their Future

Judy gets her first taste of stubble!

Our previous foray into our new fields took place back in June when a hay crop was cut - seemingly for our convenience! Of course, nothing is ever conveniently timed where farming and detecting is concerned and when we passed by just a week or two later the second crop of the year was growing abundantly and we could not resume our search there.

Finally, the arable crops were cut and we ventured out upon a new set of fields some distance away from the first. Here we saw that we had about ten acres at our disposal and half of that was permanent pasture which we'd save till wintertime. The arable land looked fairly unpromising to my eyes in that I could see very little in the way of obvious signs of past activity upon the surface. Just a few sherds of Victorian pottery scattered here and there, some fragments of clay roof tile too, but the soil not coloured by concentrated human activity or manuring.  Of course, that should not deter anyone from trying a field. We tried our best there for a couple of hours but the results were just as unpromising as the surface signs suggested they would be. Nevertheless, the dogs enjoyed it immensely and Judy had her first taste of stubble!

I noticed that even when she would put her full weight on the spade she had trouble penetrating the hard-baked surface and so I set to work making a garden border spade into a proper detecting tool. This is not a difficult task to accomplish with an angle grinder and a file and with across-the-counter prices for 'proper detecting tools' with the very same blade profile retailing at ridiculous prices, then DIY is, in my eyes, an essential economy. This wooden handled spade (and wood is best, I think!) cost just fourteen quid and half-an-hour spent cutting away excess steel then shaping, fettling and sharpening a new edge profile, transformed it into the best tool for the job. It was good quality from stock and I expect it to give many years service as it stands now. Over the counter, you might be asked to pay £45 for something similar that might well not... 

The next evening we chose to search for an hour or two in a field that my initial map research suggested might be promising. Fortunately, the stubble was that of barley and not nearly as punishing to work over as wheat stubble might be. For a beginner, I think wheat stubble might have proven too much of a deterrent, and even a seasoned pro might blanch at the thought unless wheat stubble is all that's available at the time. Judy managed it easily enough and she had plenty of signals to dig. Unfortunately, most of these were fragments of aluminium trash of which the field seemed to have far more than its fair share.

At last, she dug her first decent find - a half-penny of Edward VII and it looked to be in good condition too. Unfortunately, an hour later she'd lost it! She set off to find it again but I called her back from what would have been an utterly fruitless task in the half-light of dusk! And then I realised that I too had lost something - my high-power reading glasses, without which I cannot tell the difference these days between the half-pennies of Edward VII, George V or even Victoria... 

I've had people ask me how those people of our past managed to lose so many of their belongings for us detectorists of their future to find. 

I think that upon this evening we proved just exactly how that happens!

Target Practice - Musket Balls from a Georgian Firing Range.

Since relocating to Coventry from London way back in 2008 I have gone out detecting just a few times and then without any serious mission in mind. However, over the past few years, my wife, Judy, has developed a keen interest in Medieval history and especially the period of the Wars of the Roses. When I regaled her with tales of actually finding coins of the period with the heads of the monarchs struck upon them she expressed an interest in having a go at finding the same for herself.

Alas we had nowhere to start, but we were attending a rugby match at Ricoh Arena and at half time I went outside for a smoke, where I ran into a local farmer. I knew something of his land and so I asked for permission which he readily gave. The next day we walked our dogs to a couple of his fields and began instruction in the art of swinging a search coil.

Learning to swing with it...

She was fine with it, albeit a little unsure about how to use it effectively and swang the coil upwards on every sweep wasting half her time and missing half of her targets. After half an hour she had the swing mastered and began to find things. 

Nothing of any interest appeared until we came to a corner where she began to dig lead musket balls. Five were discovered in a short space of time and so I got the chance to explain a very important tenet of detecting theory - that people gather together for activities in discreet areas.

One these balls had in impact mark and so we discussed the idea that we had found the butts end of a firing range and this ball was one that had hit its target. Of course, then we thought that somewere nearby and within a few hundred yards at most, would be the best area to search for other items associated with this activity - the firing line.

The five musket shot recovered. These are not a type of ball that I'm familiar with, because each possesses no less than three sprue marks around the casting-seam. I am guessing that they were not cast individually but in a complex multi-shot mould. 

We did not find it that day, but no matter - the idea was locked in her head. And I think it to be a very important lesson to learn, for people in the past gathered together to do things in certain places and for good reason - and such places had boundaries outside of which very little will be found associated with the activities that took place.

Target practice!