I attended a weekend conference which consisted of a number of talks on the Roman, Bronze Age and Iron Age finds in the Elgin area. This gave me the opportunity to contact Dr Fraser Hunter, Principal Curator, Iron Age and Roman at the National Museum of Scotland who had led the dig which had unearthed the two hoards of Roman coins there. During the following week he visited my site with me and was of the opinion that it could follow the normal Roman practise of being on a site of previous Bronze and Iron age occupation and he hoped to arrange a geophysical survey of the area to see if it could produce ecidence of the occupation, in the meantime I was to carry on with my search, although the grass was making good growth and it would not be long before detecting became impossilbe.
I approached White's Electronics to see if it would be possible to get the use of a Hoard Hunter to try to find the source of the Roman coins. The fact that the coins were scattered in a line in the direction of the last plughing and were mainly better condition on one face led me to believe that they might have been sitting in a pot and only in contact with the soil on one side. I explained the position and the possibilities of further finds and was given the use of a machine over the weekend. The first day on site I covered the area thoroughly in one direction and there were very few positive signals which all turned out to be rubbish, I returned to my XLT and finished up the day with a random search of the area with no result. The second day I covered the area at the right angels to the previous attemt with the same result, just rubbish. I again went back to the XLT and set to with the garden line working very slowly, this produced another Robert II Groat in quite a fair condition and yet another Denarius which was the worst condition example to date but still with some detail .
After the weekend I returned the hoard hunter to White's and had a word with Hames about getting the absolute depth from my machine, he suggested some possibilities of balancing some of the settings and I was very keen to get back to the site to try them out as I felt that I hdad a better chance of finding the source of the Roman coins with the XLT than I had with the hoard hunter which is really set up to find large objects. The pots holding the hoards at Birnie were relatively small but would present a large target for the XLT and I assumed that any pot on the site which had been hit by the plough would probably be sitting no more than 12 inches down.
The next visit to the site I set the detector to the new settings and spend the first two hours digging up very small pieced of sliver paper and pieces of coke then a very faint signal almost like iron but with high numbers which when pin pointed showed as eight inches in depth. I was working with a trwel and dug down using my probe to locate the object which turned out to be year another Robert II Groat. I measured the hole using the probe which gave a depth of exactly eight inches, things were looking good for finding any pot which may be there. Shortly after, only about seven feet away another Denarius gave itself up, this one only about three inches down. This brought the total to
10 Denarii
5 Robert II Groats
2 Robert II Pennies
The site now become unworkable due to the length of the grass and further detecting would have to wait until after the next festival at the beginning of August. When the festival finished the whole site was covered in rubbish and a professional company was brought in to clear it up, they did a good job and the site was left visibly clear but the small items hidden in the greass were missed these included the bane of detectorists, thousands of ring pulls.
My first task was to work the general area of the hoards to remove as much as possible of the new deposits, this yielded a few articles of cheap jewellery and an amount of spendable cash along with a huge quantity of tent pegs, ring pulls, and silver paper and other rubbish much of it non metal, eyes only find. At this stage I was thinking that there would be no more Robert II or Roman coins to be found because of the thorough way I had covered the site earlier in the year and there had been several months and heavy rains to give coins the opportunity to move in the ground and nothing deep had shown up.
I reluctantly abandoned the area and moved on to the rest of the field, removing tent pegs, ring pulls, cash and sundry items. This year there did not seem to be any reasonable jewellery just cheap costume items, designed to look good from a distance. During this time the had begun to grow at a rate and in some of the areas shaded from the sun began to get too long for detecting, it was fortunate that most of the items I was recovering were on the surface so loss of depth was not a problem.
I decide that I would have one last look at the hoard site before the length of the grass made it impossible. I used my GPS to locate the position of a coin which was recovered from the centre of the scatter area and marked it with a flag. Working out from this point moving as slowly as I could and pushing the detector down through the grass, hard work this, I located a twenty pence piece and a penny and then I got a very poor signal which I would normally have rejected as a small piece of silver paper but the machine registered erratic numbers and was showing a depth of three inches and as it was the hoard site I decided to dig it. At four inches there was sign so out with the probe which located something at about three inches but off to one side. Careful excavation of the side of the hole produced half of a Robert II Groat of the Edinburgh mint
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| Half Robert II Groat |
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