Every cloud has a silver lining – Discovering a Medieval Coin Hoard (Part 1)

The following article was first written during early 2014 and I have reproduced an edited version of it here.  I still get a buzz at recollecting the tale and I hope in some small way to convey to you the amazing feelings Sharon and I had when unearthing our first significant coin hoard, over 700 years old.  If I manage to pass on the feelings of joy and excitement that ran through our veins during this experience, then I shall be happy and I will have been successful in my task.

…and without further procrastination, let the tale commence…..

Just before Christmas 2013, a detecting buddy and I ventured forth onto a new detecting permission which I had researched thoroughly and had managed to secure.  I had spent countless hours doing the research and knew that a very small hoard of medieval coins had been found in the general area, by accident, during the early 1800’s.  So, hopefully there was a reasonable chance of another.  I targeted three possible large fields where I felt our chances would be best for finding a hoard and I arranged a day for our hunt.  As usual in Scotland it was a beautiful morning with gently lashing horizontal rain and a mild 60mph breeze blowing lazily across the field.

Following tradition, I prayed to the hammy goddess and then fired up the CTX 3030 with great anticipation and a clear vision of the beautiful finds to be made that day.  Unfortunately, as so often happens to us mere mortal men, the goddess punished us with intense fervour.

After around five hours of detecting in those ‘perfect’ conditions, we were like a couple of drowning rats looking desperately for a lifeboat.  We made our way onto the third of my targeted fields, a little annoyed that we had found nothing older than the 1800’s on the first two fields.  The initial anticipation had dissipated into more of a cacophony of negative thoughts like, “Please let us find something,”, “What the heck are we doing here?” and “Whose stupid idea was this?”  It was around 3pm and we were doing a last scan of the field before heading for the sanctuary of the jeep and some sweet lukewarm tea.

Ten minutes into the last scan, I heard my friend over the walkie-talkie shouting for me to look at him.  I quickly turned around, peering through the murky light to see him around 20 yards away doing the craziest dance I'd ever seen; something resembling a cross between a barn dance and the Brazilian capoeira and this dance actually has a name in the detecting jargon used in the UK- it is called “A hammy dance”.  I immediately started my slide across the field towards him, just thankful that one of us had hit on something good at last.

On arriving he said, "I think it's a short cross," referring to an English hammered penny of the medieval period.

I took it from him and rubbed the mud from the side facing me, "Nope it's a long cross, but still a cracker," I declared.

He replied, "No, not that side, the other one."

Now, knowing my buddy wasn’t fully up-to-date with his coin identification, I rolled my eyes and flipped it over, rubbed off the mud, and found that I was staring at another long cross.  Impossible I thought, and then I realised that it was TWO coins stuck together.  I shouted jubilantly and then fell silent, mumbling to my buddy that we may have hit the possible hoard that I felt my research warranted.  His eyes bulged as he queried what I had said.  What followed was simply stunning.  My friend hadn’t even taken a step before shouting that he’d found a second…..then another.  To be honest, if at that moment a squad of cheerleaders had high-kicked their way past us, we wouldn’t have noticed..…well, we might have briefly glanced up.

As the weather was really starting to get rough, even for us mad Scots, we dug our holes as quickly as possible.  In no time at all my friend was 4-0 up in the hammered coin count, and I was staring defeat in the face.  I quickly got over his digging prowess and we both started laughing, shouting silly things and loudly berating the hammy Goddess because of her late appearance.  At this point we pushed open the gates of absolute madness and accelerated full speed into an insane detecting and clod digging frenzy.

After digging 40 coins in just over an hour of thundering rain and semi-darkness, we were exhausted, soaked through, covered in mud, but still laughing.  There were so many signals, we found ourselves simply digging clods and once we had 10 or 15 open holes, we went back on our hands and knees probing the holes with our pin-pointers to find the hammered coins.  We had decided that this was the best retrieval method for the little time we had available.  When the coins started popping out of the ground, the rain got heavier, the mist thicker and the sky eerily darker.  Unfortunately, it was at this point, that we were forced to make possibly the hardest call of our detecting lives, culminating in the decision to leave the field, which by then resembled a muddy WWI battlefield and return the following day.

So, there we were having decided to leave a field absolutely BOOMING with literally dozens of positive signals, but the conditions had just became impossible.  We had already dropped a couple of coins due to the weather conditions and to find them again was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.  Rather reluctantly we said our fond farewells to the hoard, powered down the machines and slipped away from the field of dreams.

Very early next morning, we set off with the help of Sharon and Martin McSweeney (an experienced detecting friend who has found several of his own coin hoards) for more muddy mayhem in a small corner of a Scottish field.  Strange as it may sound, on the journey back to the site, my buddy and I were a little paranoid and actually doubted our experience of the night before.  Did we really hear all those other signals?  What happens if the detecting team walk onto the field and start digging scrap?  We needn’t have worried though, as what followed was another round of pure and utter digging madness.

As we walked onto the field that morning we were all just BUZZINNNNNNNG!  You could literally feel the excitement coming from the group and the air was just electric with anticipation.  My buddy was the first to get a signal, and I dutifully manned the video as he dug a clod and turned it over.  I gulped and frowned as he unearthed a piece of lead.  Then there was an urgent cry from Sharon, “HAMMY!”  With the video still running, I rushed over to see her.  As she turned over the little piece of muck she was holding between her fingers and the camera picked up a shiny little hammered coin; number 41 of the hoard.  I will swear forever that the bust of King Edward I on that particular coin was smiling up at us, happy once more to see the light of day – a magical moment I shall never forget.

The madness then really started in earnest with shouts of “hammy”, “another one” and “you beauty” filling the air, along with raucous laughter and merriment.  It was a great feeling to see the rest of the team experiencing what we had the night before.  Fifteen minutes into the dig we had recovered another 15 medieval coins between us.  Sharon had hit a couple more, both of which she described as “just perfect,” which brought a smile from the rest of us.

Within an hour the four tins, which were in use for the coin storage, were filling up nicely.  At this point, Marty started his own insane session of dirt fishing and just ripped the little beauties out of the earth at a ferocious pace with his Explorer II.  This is the way it continued for the next six hours until once again we were beaten by the light, howling wind and persistent heavy rain.  At the end of day two, we had dug another 101 coins, giving us the grand total of 141 beautiful medieval silver pennies.

The next detecting session actually started on the fifth day after the initial discovery, due to prior commitments of the team members.  The weather was easing slightly and although the wind was still blowing hurricane force, the lure of the hoard was just too much for us.  We arrived on site knowing that most of the easy finds were gone, and we were looking for the scratchy, on edge, deeper variety of hammered coin - altogether a different breed of target.  Sharon, who has mastered the slow and low technique, simply put her head down and started pulling up the most impossible of coins; deep, on edge, broken flans, fragments, you name it and she found them.  We ended the day with a further 23 hammered coins, with the lion’s share falling to Sharon.  Over the next two hunts we managed to unearth another 13 of those little beauties before deciding that we had exhausted our ready supply, our demand however, was most certainly still there.  Unfortunately, at the time nobody in the team had a really deep pulse machine to get deeper and find the difficult targets, which was something I decided to rectify as soon as possible.  However, as we didn’t have one, we were having to become masters of gridding the area and very slow and very low detecting to try and wrinkle out any coins that remained.  It seemed that this was going to be rather a long process.

We discovered 177 coins in those first hunts and it became obvious during our digging that this hoard had great historic value.  At the time it started to look like the biggest unique hoard of medieval pennies, found by metal detectorists in Scotland.  It also became one of the largest found in recent times within the UK.

From the first night, the hoard was reported to the local landowner, tenant farmer and the Scottish Treasure Trove Unit and they were kept fully up-to-date throughout the recovery.  All finds were plotted and accurately recorded, so much in fact that we managed to understand where we thought the scattered hoard may have originated from – the place the farmer’s plough first hit the main buried deposit and scattered them outwards, several dozen yards, in a very rough conical shape.

It is at this point we’ll leave the story for now.  Be sure to find out what happened in Part 2, during the continued adventures at our rather wet and muddy field of dreams.

Catch you next time from the wild, wet and windy fields of bonny Scotland.

Slàinte