From a rainy start on an early Sunday Morning, myself and fellow Club members of the Dorset Relic Hunters Metal Detecting Club sat out to search for the hidden history hidden in a field in the Hampshire area.
The area has great historic interest from Bronze Age right through to post medieval, so you never know what is going to be found.
As the rain was coming down and the wind was strong we all started on a great hope of unrevealing Hampshire’s historic history! There was a few post medieval buttons and coins being found but in general started off very quiet with finds any older.
The field was in grass and the ground was quite condense of a strong clay mixture so I had decided to use my CTX 3030 for optimum depth, after a few buttons and Georgian copper coins I had a beautiful little signal indicating something very small and in the silver range…..
After removing a clod of soil about 5 inches down I seen a tiny round silver object looking at me! I picked it up trying to gently remove the dirt from it to work out what it was?
At the size of just under 1cm across you can imagine how small this target was, with the dirt slowly coming off I could clearly see this was looking silver and like a small ring with writing around the outside of it.
Not knowing entirely what it was I called a couple of friends over which were near me at the time, they informed me of it looking like it could be a silver hawking ring.
Now getting really excited with its possible untold history I went back to the car to retire from the torrential rain and wind and started looking on the internet on my phone at other possible examples found.
To my amazement there had been one other almost matching item found not far away from where I was, which also was a similar type of hawking ring with the matching style writing and just the name Mr. Will Russell missing.
After returning home I started putting the pieces of the puzzle together and discovering that where I had been detecting was once owned by a “Lord William Russell” and his wife as part of a large country estate.
Now thanks to the previous finder of the other silver hawking ring which was recorded on the PAS website I could now almost connect and say where this one had originated from.
In previous century’s Lord William Russell and his wife lived and owned the estate in Hampshire and from a upper class society life style liked Falconry and hunting with birds of prey.
I looked further into the life of Lord William Russell finding out that he had been found guilty of treason and executed by means of being be-heading in 1683 for his involvement in the Rye house plot for planning the death of the current king Charles 11 and his brother James Duke of York which failed.
It just goes to show how important even the smallest of finds can be in revealing are history and the importance in recording.
This item will now be recorded on the PAS data base and studied further.
Gary Smith (Coinhunteruk), UK
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