First Dig, new site, odd finds!

[skypilot]

First dig on a new site yesterday. Not a battlefield as such - a former WW1 PoW camp and pre-war territorial tented camp. Since then it has been purely farm land, the hutted camp having been dismantled shortly after the war. The fields have all been ploughed regularly so not much in the way of surface material as most of it seems to have been ploughed in over the 90 years of farming.

The area is well-known but largely unexplored from a detecting point of view. Thankfully, the site was also well-photographed at the time so identifying suitable likely sites is reasonably straight forward.

So, I had a quick recce and below is what I found, right in the middle of a recently cut barley field....

.....the metal cylinder is a Swandown branded lipstick (thought it was a swagger stick top when it came up!); the item on the left is the remains of a period fork/spoon/knife; the small winged badge with the Spanish flag emblem has "IBERIA" underneath it. Iberia Airways was only known as Iberia from 1927-29 so I'm assuming it's from this period; the small round disc is a lead seal of some sort. It has some foreign wording around the outside of one side along with a rampant lion and crown coat of arms, language not known by me (I speak French, German & English)- reverse has "10" and what looks like "Cromer" of similar (not Kroner) around the outside.

So, nothing too earth-shatteringly exciting but nevertheless interesting. Any light that can be shed on the lipstick and lead seal would be appreciated. I have found a 1948 advert for Swandown lipstick but wondered if it pre-dated that time.

How on earth this mixed bag ended up in the middle of the field I do not know but it looks promising for future finds. Back out tomorrow......

[Blitzkrieg Bop]

Nice finds.

[Dolan]

Interesting stuff!

Dolan

[Rommel1942]

Odd assortment of finds.., neat anyway

Regards,
Finn

[skypilot]

Odd assortment of finds.., neat anyway

Regards,
Finn

My thoughts entirely! I have since found out that the lead seal is probably Belgian although what it was attached to and the significance of the "10" is I don't know. I suspect it relates to a weight of some sort.

Looking forward to seeing what turns up tomorrow. There is a known rubbish pit so I may trawl through that knowing I'll find stuff but I'm still eager to find my first cap badge. I've done plenty of aviation research and detecting but never found a cap badge or medal. Sounds a bit petty, but there you go!

[Rommel1942]

Make sure you post up what you find tomorrow! good luck !

Regards,
Finn

[Steve T]

Nice start. Obviously a lot more stuff there worth finding !!!

Looking forward to seeing your latest finds

Steve T

[skypilot]

Well, apologies for not posting the latest finds sooner - I couldn't work out how to find the threads during the maintenance period.

Here's what I found "the next day". I managed to find the site of the ruvbbish dump, which is actually a very large area. The ground has clearly never been farmed and the ground is literally littered with stuff as shown in the picture - every surface lump you see is pretty much an item rather than a stone.

Sadly, I guess the site was cleared at some point, most likely with a dozer or similar as the glass is very broken but less so on the fringes. A detector was used but not a lot of metal turned up apart from the bizarre ball-shaped object shown. Just scraping the surface with a hand trowel brought up loads of stuff and I found items down to a depth of 6-8 inches in a continuous layer.

As I said, a lot of the stuff is broken up, but I'm sure there will be other items of interest to find in the future. I brought back some of the more interesting glass bottle finds and I was pleased with one complete find that was unbroken. Only a couple of items were German - the broken jar lid and the small broken pipe bowl in the centre of the picture below - I'll post a close-up later.

So, better than day one but still no cap badge!

[Steve T]

Keep going. Judging by the finds you're getting, there will be something worth it's weight in gold in that spot. I'm sure of it !

Well done !

Steve T