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.