A Field of Queens.

I feel really privileged to live in such beautiful surroundings. Thanks to this amazing hobby I have seen stunning sunrises and breath-taking sunsets, awe-inspiring landscapes and wild animals, as they are supposed to be, roaming free.

Recently I have been reminded that I don't have to find cool relics all the time. The experience of being out in such a beautiful place is the greatest treasure of all. 

Last week I took a lunch break, hopped in my car and took a drive to that field where my wife found that Victorian horse-tack piece. It was a lovely spring day that took me back to my school days and reminded of walking home from the bus stop on the last day of school at the start of the summer holidays.

I arrived at the field convinced that there must be more to be found here. This field is located right next to the old wagon road and is nice and level, the perfect place to set up camp. 

I zig-zagged across the field and only got signals when I got near the road. These, unfortunately, turned out to be bottle-tops and cans, typical modern roadside junk. I worked my way all the way until I neared the two electrical Pylons, towards the side where the rural township begins. I was just thinking I can't be more than a few meters from where my wife found that horse tac tag when my detector sang a sweet high 70s tones into my ear. "That sounds better," I said to myself as I checked the depth.  The target was deep and the ground was really hard so I had a good feeling from the start. When I saw the size and shape of the target I immediately knew I had just dug my own British Cavalry horse-tack tag. On the way home my mind raced. Was each item serialized or was a number issued to a rider or regiment? The tag was dirty and I could only just make out the crown on it.  What I found when I cleaned it took me totally by surprise. It was indeed a queens crown but the initials that came through were not those of Queen Victoria but rather those of Queen Elizabeth. 

Elizabethan horse-tack serial number tag. 

Surely there must be more to this area if we can find two of these tags, so close together on the same field. The tags could be up to 100 years apart in age. The farmer did describe the field as "The field with the two pylons where they dumped the horse manure." He may have been referring to the old days as we didn't see any horse manure. Perhaps these items ended up getting dumped with the horse manure.

While on the subject of horse-tack, I often see detectorists posting these brass rivets and for the most part, no one seems to know what they were from. 

Brass rivets often dug on old sites.

One of the uses I have discovered was for horse-tack. Occasionally, I dig up items that still have bits of leather attached. Below you can see how leather was attached using those brass rivets. 

Brass rivets hold leather to buckles.

On the weekend we spent some more time beach hunting and found more ruined coins and a few "spendies" for our jar. I also dug a live 9mm round which is not the type of target you expect or would like to find on the beach. As a parent, I could just imagine finding a child playing with the bullet while building their sand-castle. I'm just glad I could find it first and dispose of it properly. 

Live bullet found on the beach.

We bumped into another couple who were detecting on the beach and it was really awesome being able to chat about the hobby. Of course, we exchanged phone numbers so we can arrange some hunts sometime in the future when this Corona madness is behind us. 

On Sunday we decided to check out a field that has been cleared recently. Why we choose the hottest days to go to fields you can only get to on foot is beyond me. It reached 35 degrees celsius and we must have lost a  few kilo's that day. The field was super... super quiet that is. We did find a ton of smashed up modern bullets on the one side I assume someone had been doing some target practice. I also found a random piece of metal I decided to clean up and discovered part of a word or name, "ARC", stamped on it. Once again proving that it's always a good idea to clean those random pieces of metal before disposing of them.

Random piece of metal which turned out to have letters stamped on it.

The cane fires have been raging and more fields are being cleared, so I have plenty of ground to cover. 

Freshly burnt sugarcane. This field will just be sand in a few days.

Oh, and of course I made some trips to the Field of Buttons, and yes, there are still finds being made there.  I'm still convinced I'm going find a silver coin there, or a coin from the 1800s.

Here are some of the latest finds from the field of buttons...

 

A buckle and a piece of a possible bracelet. 

This appears to have been the front cover to a pocket watch.

This is a French suspender buckle. stamped "Solide", "Paris"

Some harmonica reed pieces, a good sign there

is still more to be found.

Badge  or Pin,  possibly a decorative "V" or "W"

We drive past some of the other farms in the area on our way to town and they have also been busy clearing fields. Looks like it's time to pluck up the courage to ask some strangers if I can wander around on their land looking for treasure. I think the conversation will be easier now that I can use their neighbour as a reference.

"The past is certain, the future obscure" - Thales of Miletus

This past week has not been extremely eventful in terms of metal detecting finds. I returned to the hill a few times over the past few days and found nothing. It's almost like I had been drawn from target to target until I had found all there was to find. That field and the field of buttons have spoiled me now and I find it difficult to picture myself walking row by row, meticulously scanning every square centimetre of the field in the hopes of finding one or two more relics. 

As a result, I found myself bouncing from one end of the farm to then next in search of the next "superfield", occasionally returning to the field on the hill or the field of buttons. On one of my trips to the field of buttons, I came across crisp, stable, "78" tone under a pile of sugarcane leaves. Out came a battered thimble with the end missing. 

Broken Thimble

 Not far from the thimble I was greeted by a sharp 60s signal which turned out to be a 4-hole button lying on the surface. I didn't name this field the Button Field for nothing.  I have probably found more than half the buttons in my collection in this field. Alright, I am fairly new to the hobby but I still find more buttons there than any other item in this field. What's interesting is the number of countries of origin that have been represented in this field alone. England, Scottland, France, America, South Africa and now Australia. The latest button has "GR Brown, Eaglehawk" on the front. Eaglehawk is a suburb of Bendigo in Victoria,  Australia. I found an exert from the Bendigo Advertiser dated March 2nd, 1898 stating that GR Brown had opened the shop next to his tailoring establishment to show an assortment of fashionable goods never seen before.

GR Brown 4-hole button from Australia.

One of my recent finds had me taking to the forums to set my mind at ease. I have dug these up all over the farm and can count four, including this one, that I have lying with the hoes, hinges and square nails in the pile of semi-interesting items I haven't decided what to do with yet. I just had to know what it is. As I mentioned to my online friends, this item is strangely familiar which could be due to me having found so many of them.  

Primus Burner

The replies were unanimous. This is a primus burner. The primus stove was invented in 1892 by Frans Wilhelm Lindqvist, a factory mechanic in Stockholm. As this was the worlds first pressurised paraffin stove he decided to call it "Primus" meaning first.  On a side note, there is a brand of primus stove called "Optimus" and their stove is called the "Optimus Primus." I can't help but think that this is where the writers of the hit comics and sci-fi movies "Transformers" got the name for their lead robot "Optimus Prime."

As mentioned in last weeks post we have been going to the beach and giving beach hunting a go. We spent a good few hours on the beach last weekend and it got me thinking of the future of this amazing hobby. I absolutely love finding old relics, personal items and old coins. I've mentioned before that the pride and care taken in the craftsmanship of some of these old day-to-day items is something that you just don't see anymore. Even something a simple as a lipstick tube would have been made of shiny, polished brass and engraved with ornate designs. 

I've often heard my American counterparts speak of "Zincoln" or "Stinkin Lincoln" pennies referring to the modern coins made inferrior materials that just degrade into nothingness in a few years. Sadly our modern coins have followed this trend and are also made of similar materials. Our brass looking lower denomination cents are bronze plated steel and our "silver" coins are nickel-plated copper. The salty seawater and the waves ensure that most coins recovered from the beach do not end up in our "spendy" jar. Most of them are trash. Some barely look like coins anymore and it got me thinking of what my grandchildren or great-grandchildren will be finding if they metal detected. Will the hobby still be around and will there be anything worth finding?

Back to the beach hunt. Once I discovered that iron signals could be coins on the beach and put that together with my knowledge of how the R1, R2 and R5 coins sound I was off and together with the Treasure Whisperers we did quite well. 

Well, the superfield is still out there somewhere, and I'll keep looking for it. You can rest assured that I'll tell you about it when I find it. 

The sun sets as the Fiery-Necked Nightjar calls me home from my quest to find a superfield. 

Sometimes those little bits of scrap, aren't.

 

As a detectorist, I dig a lot of rubbish and I've become increasingly aware of metal objects, from the foil medication is sealed in, to tin cans, even chip packets contain metal these days. The problem is there is so much rubbish out there that sometimes I find myself about to write an item off when something in my gut tells me to clean it and get it under a magnifying glass first. This past week has been an excellent reminder to double-check everything before assuming it's just another random piece of metal or scrunched up jar lid.

On Saturday we decided to check out a new field the farmer suggested. It's near two electrical pylons next to the wagon road, near the edge of our permission. I had been to the field above it the previous day for a short lunchtime hunt with my daughter and found nothing. We walked back to the car and I took a quick swing over the field and got a signal, almost immediately... a piece of harmonica reed, a promising sign.

On Saturday morning we tried our hand at beach detecting and pocketed R4.10 in change and threw away countless bottle caps and other rubbish people seem to think is hidden forever if they just bury it in the sand.  

That afternoon after lunch we headed back to the field, curious to see see how the power lines were going to affect our detectors. I had sprained my left wrist badly using a make-shift sand-scoop at the beach so my daughter was digging for me and my wife was a few rows down going solo. Well, we didn't spend too much time on the field but only my wife got a signal. She pulled out two flat pieces of metal. We checked them briefly and agreed to take a better look when we got home. The two dirty pieces of flat metal didn't look much better at home but I figured seeing as we hadn't found anything else we would give them a rinse. 

Immediately the Victorian crown came through, followed by the initials V.R. and a letter M engraved top right with the number 61 bottom right. A super cool find. The "V.R". is for Victoria Regina and I have since learnt that Regina is a Latin word meaning "the queen". 

The other piece of metal was flat with no real markings except for the faint letter "N". I posted it to the British Military Badge forum and was asked how big it is so I sent an image showing the scale. 

The reply suggested that they were used to track military issued horse tackle and would have been fixed to reigns, bridals, saddles etc. This made sense as we could see the two pieces where once joined and could have been slipped over a strap and crimped into place. 

Unfortunately, that field is a weekend field because it's too far and right on the border of the farm and the rural area, so not somewhere I feel comfortable hanging out at sunrise or sunset. Oh, and our detectors really don't like the powerlines. They chatter like a Fever tree full of Weaver birds on a sunny spring afternoon. 

At some point, during the weekend my wife picked up a piece of metal on my desk I hadn't gotten round to adding to our junk pile yet and said, "This reminds me of my find, you should clean it.". I figured it wouldn't hurt to make sure. Much to my surprise, I could see letters appearing through the dirt and only when I looked at it a little closer did I notice it had been cut in an interesting design on the one side. It has "The Lesmah" printed on it. The only thing close to this that I can find is a place in Scotland called Lesmahagow. 

I have had a fixation with detecting the tops of the hills around the farm but have not had much opportunity to do so as most of them are still covered with sugarcane. I keep thinking that a hilltop would be an excellent place for a fort or military camp. It gives the advantage of being able to see your enemy coming from a distance. I've also been trying to find the link into the field we have been finding all the buttons on but the fields around it all seem to be clean. I decided to go to the one field I haven't checked yet. It is a field I attempted to go to a week or two ago but chickened out because it is on the edge of the rural township, or so I thought. 

I started working my way up the hill from where I had parked. and got a clean 70's signal, a small brass press-stud. I found the other half of the press-stud about a meter further into the field. I then stumbled onto a clear low 80's signal a little further up the hill and dug my first, fully intact, Victorian General Service button. This field has been on my mind for quite a while and it looks like I may have been right about this one. Another interesting snippet of information is the button back-mark is "Smith&Wright  Birmingham". I knew I had seen this somewhere before and a quick search of my blog found it. I had dug a broken back of a button before. I suggested could be British Military when I researched the back-mark. You can read that story in my post titled "Hunting with the Treasure Whisperers"

I zig-zagged my way up to the top. Wow! I didn't expect that it would be so beautiful up there. I could now see that the huts are actually a fair distance off and the hill has a large flat area on top that slowly dipped to the east. From the top, I could see that it's higher than most the other hills on the farm. I started working my way east and got onto another signal. A few items came out the hole that I'm not quite sure of yet. A possible part of a Martini-Henry shell casing and another brass object I can't identify. "At least it's not a bottle-cap!" I said to myself as I continued. Then a sharp 90's signal caught me by surprise. A rather deep hole revealed a crusty South African Penny from 1944.

 

On the way back to the car I picked up another clear signal near the surface and pulled out what appeared at first glance to be a mangled piece of tin or possibly a lid. I paused while I decided whether to discard in my junk bag or slip it into my pouch. A straight edge on the one side made me think it needed further investigation so into the pouch it went. A quick clean and another big surprise. The badge forum says it's not Navy and could be shipping related. 

All of this from a 30-minute hunt, I just had to go back after work to get another 30 mins or so in. First target, a spoon handle. Nickel-plated with Pak-Alam printed on it. Turns out it's a company from Pakistan that was established in 1948, so the spoon probably isn't that old. "Why is it always the handle, where do all the bowls go?" I thought as I hit another signal about 2 meters down the row and dug the bowl. I thought I had the full spoon but it turns out there is a piece missing between the bowl and handle. 

I wandered around and dug two four-hole buttons, a "Best Ring Edge" and another one from Simpson Durban. This time the local button has given me a little more information to help with the research, it has "WH Simpson, Durban" stamped on it. 

On the way back to the car this time I dug a metal badge that reads "Smith&Wesson Fitted Jeans" and has a picture of horses and a wagon on it. I thought Smith&Wesson only made guns, I had no idea they sold clothing as well. I also can't find the badge anywhere online so I'm guessing it's fairly old. 

This field is another one of those fields I can listen to all day. I did dig one bottle cap and a tin can but they were on the side near the road. It's a big field and I really think the flat top area is going to be the place to hunt although there's also that sloping side to the east...hmnn. Oh well, I guess I just need to take it one hole at a time.  

 

Sunset from halfway up the hill.