29th December 2010, 11:55 AM
Have dug a short-lived Norman castle where the bailey area was littered with fiddle-key nails (implying lots of shod horses) but precious few horseshoes/fragments, suspect they're big enough to get rescued and re-cycled? Have also done 2 pipeline jobs across the Neville's Cross battlefield (English trashing the Scots again, sorry....) and recovered no recognisably contemporary ironwork, no arrowheads, nothing, so suspect that contemporary re-cycling was pretty good, a handy top-up to the average peasant's income? Hence you may need to find a battlefield in a suitably non-acidic bog somewhere, or maybe a nice sandy desert where stuff gets buried immediately. Do the battlefield end of the metal-detecting contingent ever pick that sort of stuff up or do they usually have their machines in discriminating mode?