Had a long weekend dilemma on whether to go interstate for a detect, or stick to a local site for another go. Ended up chosing a local site we have visited a few times in the past with varying succes, and was very surprised at the results. Seems that someone has also been there recently, with open pick holes all over the place
, though fortunately for us they didn't seem to know what they were doing (targeting large junk targets). Rather than detect around the ruins, we headed off down the adjacent track to see if finds had been graded a distance from the ruins, and we managed to hit a small partch rich in finds.
Despite the first find being a ramshead shilling, it was extremely difficult going with the ground saturated in rusty iron nails - the type of ground that gives up 4 or so nails before you even find the initial target. It really was a case of removing the offending nails to see what targets were being masked, and there were lots of them, none of the coins aside from the penny were obivous clean high tone hits, just hints of something good amongst the nails. I'd that many detectorist has walked over this section of ground on multiple occasions without much interest, you simply could not hear any of the good targets until you started diggin, often revealing multiple non-ferrous targets in the same hole.
I'd say that we were not finding targets from the ruins, but more than likely some stables further down from the ruins going by all the buckles and horse tack. Also going by the age of some of the finds, the site was occupied or utilised from the 1800's right through to the late 1900's. I have never found so many of the more modern dog tags on the same site - oldest from the 1950's through to the early 80's. The silvers also date back to the 1920's aside from Mrs Goldpick's solitary coin, an 1891 Veilhead thrip in great nick.
After pulling several buckles, buttons, cufflink and various pieces of horse tack, I found an interesting pen made for AMP in the 1925 - showing total company assets of 57,000,000!
I started off with the 11" coil and decided it would wise to use the smaller 9" HF coil, that's when the finds really started to flow. All up a great day out, the knees are a bit sore but worth the effort.
What we had to deal with!