AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF METAL DETECTING
For over a decade my family has been involved with and owned several horses. During this time I have witnessed injuries to horses’ legs from iron and other scrap metal buried in horse-fields at least since the industrial revolution.
A few years ago I volunteered to help a charity that rescues racehorses and I got permission to clear a few acres of horse-fields from scrap metal. As my collection of photographs on the post “Spade Works” shows the scrap metal quantities were and continues to be overwhelming. Many sharp irons and wires of all kinds capable of delivering serious injuries to horses, especially on clay fields with deep mud after a period of heavy rainfall.
So, this is how the metal detecting started. First a service to the beautiful horse and then to history.
As a keen reader of ancient and medieval history, a practitioner of Historical European Marshal Arts (HEMA), horseback archery, demonstrator and maker of medieval yew warbows, participating in historical re-enactments at international traditional archery festivals, Azincourt 600, Battle of Hastings 950, Jorvik, Battle of Tewkesbury e.t.c., the metal detector became my time machine taking me back to many of the histories I read and practise.
I am not very interested in coins. For me it is one of the indications of dating the fields. I am the happiest when I unearth an artefact that was belonged to someone, and feeling an energy, a connection with an ancestor. That feeling cannot be described, because if it is, it would lose all it’s magic. If the reader is a metal detectorist, then you know what I mean!
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