Despite living in an area with a known Roman history I never find anything Roman whilst out detecting until this popped up.
This was one was found on one of my favourite fields to detect on, I probably have about 5 favourite fields where something interesting usually shows up. I hope I haven’t jinxed it for future detecting days out now!
This was in August earlier this year, I had driven past the field the day before and noticed that the grass had only just been cut, so me and Bob decided to get on it straight away.
We set about generally wandering about on this field and finding the usual pre decimal coins and buttons and the usual bits of scrap that you can’t avoid finding when metal detecting. I found some sort of pocket watch chain fob item, a spindle whorl and a musket ball. All very interesting but nothing too amazing.
Then right in the middle of the field I had a pretty decent signal and dug out a nice round plug and checked with my detector to see if it had come out with the plug or if it was still in the hole. It was still in the hole, so I used my pinpointer to see where it was. It was right in the centre somewhere, just a little deeper in the ground. I used my digging tool to gently loosen the compacted soil around the area indicated then scooped out a handful of the loosened soil, I immediately felt something hard and metallic in my hand, I opened my hand and saw it just sitting there.
I knew what it was straight away, I had never found one before, but had seen enough photo’s of them to know that it was a Roman brooch fibula. Me and Bob give each other a shout if we find something interesting. A shout of “Hi Ho!” means Silver, “I’m dancing” means gold (sadly we don’t use that one very often), “Medieevalll!” means just that. However this time I was in shock, I didn’t know what to shout so after a moment I just kind of squeaked “fibula…” We do have a running joke about some metallic finds being “fibula-esque”, but of course they never were an actual fibula. Bob wasn’t sure what I had said so just said “what’s that?”. I had composed myself by then and shouted “fibula!”. He just laughed and said “yeah right..” I said no, I mean it I have found an actual fibula. He dropped everything and hurried across to me and I dropped it into his hand. It is tiny but there was no doubt that it was a very small Roman fibula brooch, probably a child’s. He congratulated me on my find (well in a sort of friendly but begrudging way) and I placed it in my coin pod and we continued to detect.
As usual nothing else that we found that day came close to the fibula. So at the end of the day, after a few pints in the local pub (where the barmaid told us that she had got us a new permission at the next farm along from this one) I headed home to gently clean and photograph the fibula.
After posting photos online the general consensus was that it is indeed a child’s fibula brooch probably dating to the 1st or 2nd Century. So that makes it my first ever fibula, and my first ever Roman find.
