It was a warm summers evening when I was out in one of my favourite fields. I wasn’t finding much but it was just nice to be out and about in the evening sun. I was finding the occasional toasted Georgian copper coin and of course a few buttons and a lot of pieces of lead and other bits for my growing scrap collection.
The next signal sounded okay, not particularly stunning but good enough to dig, as usual I used my spade to cut a piece of grass just large enough to flip over and then checked the hole to see whether the signal was still down there somewhere, it was.
I then used my hand held pinpointer to locate the signal which seemed to be just below the surface so i gently prised the soil apart keeping my sharp digging tool away from the target, I just wanted to loosen the soil around so that I could hopefully lift out a ball of soil that was containing the item. I managed to do this and whatever it was, was now in my hand in a clump of soil, so I kept breaking pieces off, then I caught sight of it.
It was clearly a silver hammered coin, and a fair sized one at that. In my part of the country I don’t find a lot of them so it was great to find this one. I couldn’t quite make out exactly what it was out in the field because all I was doing was smearing damp mud over each time I tried to get a closer look. I thought that it was probably an Elizabeth the 1st sixpence and put it in my coin pod for a closer look once I got home. After another hour or so detecting I decided that it was time to head home.
Once back home I gave the silver coin a light cleaning and was very surprised to the that it wasn’t Elizabeth 1st at all, it was Edward VI ‘the boy king’. It was definitely a sixpence because it has VI alongside his head. He is looking straight ahead and not to the side, which I believe makes this from the third period 1550-1553. It is slightly mangled but I do really like it anyway.
