The Sword in the Stone
Vlad, Carol, here is a short treasure story I put together a few years back that you may like to add to your site`s collection if you think it is good enough.I`m afraid I dont have the pix for it any longer but it is a true experience.
The Sword in the Stone By Tim (Mü)
Now if I had to pick a favourite day of
the week my choice would land squarely on Sunday,
family commitments mean
that I dont get the opportunity to get out there and hunt as often as I would
like so I have to restrict most of my relic hunting to a Sunday.
Its a regular
thing though and most Sundays are reserved for a trip out to the hills, and Friday
evening is usually spent rounding up the members of our small team. We only have
six members and no more than four are usually available at any one time which
sits just right for a days hunting.
I still get a buzz , the anticipation
kick that preceeds a day`s searching, getting up at the crack of dawn, assembling
my gear and snatching a coffee while everyone else in the house is asleep before
heading out onto the autobahn to rendezvous with my pals.
I became a Relic
Hunter convert about two years back, and over the years I must have tried about
every different aspect of metal detecting at one stage or another.
I`d run
the whole gamut of parkland searching then to beaches, switching finally after
two three years to inland agricultural field searching, more or less settling
on this particular aspect of T/H`ing.
One thing you realise if you`ve been
at this hobby of ours for any length of time, is the absolute necessity for a
good reserve of patience. Our hobby has a massive learning curve,
I`ve been
hunting since 1981 and I would say I still learn new stuff each time I go out.
Never take anything for granted, be prepared to be flexible in the way you
review a site and be prepared to dump your preconditioned ideas that we all tend
to suffer from.
I was always fairly satisfied with hunting ploughland,
living in one of the most beautiful parts of Germany helped, its hard to get too
uptight when your having a poor days detecting when you`re hunting in such a picturesque
landscape, and most farmland sites are generally prolific with interesting finds
of differing historical periods. But.. and there always was this underlying But,
it was often mixed with the dissapointment of recovering damaged or partial artifacts
often in some cases just recently smashed by the plough.
The use of modern
fertilisers in agriculture further reduces your chances of recovering nice undamaged
finds, dial in an acidic soil composition and you can kiss goodbye to some lovely
coins and artifacts.
Talks amongst ourselves regularly returned to this
topic of smashed and damaged finds and it was then one of our number suggested
we perhaps ought to give the woodlands and forests a try.
We had previously
given these areas a wide berth as most of our forests are modern plantations and
hadnt generally produced much in the way of anything, the couple of searches we
had made of these types of places had been boring and unproductive or else we`d
run into an area that had been plastered with anti-radar chaff or window (strips
of aluminium dropped by the Allies during WWII to confuse or jam the German radar
systems) we`d more or less vowed to never venture into the woods ever again.
With this in mind it took some pretty powerful persuasion to spend a valuable
Sunday`s hunting up in the woods but the matter was finally resolved by narrowing
down our search to an area of very ancient woodland.
Patience..,patience..
talk about having to relearn the hobby all over again, I was experiencing the
same frustration that I`d had the first time I quit the beaches to hunt on farmland.
It was a case of deep breaths, concentrate and stick at the job in hand.
Woodland is as rule never as prolific for finds when say compared to farmland
but Oh...
Its one of those rare places where you can find those " Oh
my God " once in a lifetime
finds. Master and cope with the infrequency
of the targets and make the necessary adjustments to increase your patience threshold
and you`ve arrived at Treasure Hunting
Nirvarna my friend, it just doesnt
get any better than this.
My Baptism of Fire came after watching my best
friend extract a small hoard of silver coinage from the side of a forest rock
outcrop where it had lain undisturbed since being deposited in the mid 1600`s.
He then went on to add insult to injury by recovering a complete medieaval iron
battle axehead no more than 200 yards distant and from that moment on we were
all completely hooked. No more would our regular meetings discussions revolve
around the availability of searchable farmland, the sudden realisation dawning
that we were no longer shackled to the restraints of the agricultural calendar
that we were so previously dependant upon for our searching.
I must add that
not everyone in our group was convinced that this was the way forward, there were
several who struggled to adjust to this kind of searching particularly after a
poor days hunt with little to show for the hours put in, but there`s no gain without
pain as the saying goes. We all now two years down the line realise that everyone
has the potential to make stunning finds, you just have to put the physical time
in out there covering the ground and invest time in identifying potential site
areas.
Maps spread wide one Friday evening at a pals house, we threw around
a couple of possible locations for a Sunday search concentrating on the River
Danube and finally decided on a side hanging valley entrance overlooking the river.
It was steep wooded terrain terminating
in a sheer limestone cliff face which
was unusual in the fact that it formed a natural circular ampitheatre almost completely
enclosed and out of the eyeline of anyone standing in the valley 400 feet below.
If you didnt have a map you wouldnt have known it was there and more importantly
there were no modern trackways anywhere nearby so modern junk wasnt going to be
a problem.