Thursday 23 November 2017

Treasure?



On my daily walks around the immediate area, I'm always on the look-out for Stone-Age tools or buried treasure. I check the mounds left by Moles, and I walk across newly ploughed fields. I have found one or two ancient artifacts, but the cache of Roman gold coins still eludes me.

Rather like mushroom hunting, one doesn't look for the object itself, but for colour and form.

Yesterday whilst walking across a harvested Maize field, I came across the above. All I could see was that it was flat thin and round. I was convinced I'd found my first gold coin.

Having given the piece a good wash, I find that it is no more than a One Franc coin from 1941 (it's older than I am; a true antique).

As I do with all such coins, I shall find a crack in one of the ancient house beams, and force it in. Maybe by the time it's found again, it might be worth a few centimes!




26 comments:

  1. Brilliant idea of poking it into the wooden beams to become an archeological find!
    We find bits of old pottery chard, very small, up at the temple area. A friend showed us how to find them, otherwise you would walk right over them. Of course you're not supposed to pick and remove anything. Quite exciting though to think how old these tiny pieces might be

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    1. I have a tiny piece from Knossos, painted with olive leaves. Maybe I should have left it.

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  2. Perhaps you should get yourself a metal detector. Hours of fun!

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    1. I did borrow one once. I don't think it was working properly, I found no gold at all.

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  3. A lovely idea to put the coin in a beam .... when we had our 17th Century cottage we found all sorts of things including a petrified rat !! People used to put all sorts of strange things in their walls, didn't they ...... witch bottles to counteract a witch's curse, shoes, cats and even babies !!! XXXX

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    1. I attended a medieval school (founded 970), and we later learned that there had been a nun walled up in one of my study walls; along with hundreds of medieval bottles. If only we'd known!

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  4. When renovating our Normandy farmhouse of 1764 we found an old pair of boots behind a wall. We holed them up again. A friend found a mummified cat behind the wall next to the fireplace in his old cottage nearby. No gold treasure though as I expect the original inhabitants were very very poor, just prior to the French Revolution.

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    1. My village has the suffix 'ac', which denotes some form of Roman occupation. Seeing as the Romans had no Barclays Bank to deposit their gold etc. They must have buried it somewhere whilst off raping and pillaging. I'm still looking!

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  5. We are surrounded by antiques but i have never found a coin.

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    1. I've found plenty of coins, but nothing of value.

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  6. Have they invented a detector that can be set to gold and silver? I'm sure that the Star Trek boys would have a 'tricorder'.

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  7. Cro, that is very interesting. What else have you found? I like reading about ancient hordes of jewellery and coins found in fields. It makes you think about who might have owned them. A bit of history and mystery.

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    1. I've found mainly old Stone-Age artifacts. Nothing spectacular, but always interesting.

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    2. I should have said hoard(spellcheck).

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  8. I like what you do with the coins you find.

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    1. I've always done it. It seemed logical when I started.

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  9. I found a bunch of George V half crowns in an old purse recently. It's probably what every one in England has in the back of a drawer.

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    1. I have loads of old English coins in a box somewhere; half crowns, two bobs, shillings, sixpenses, thrupenny bits, etc. Even lots of brown shrapnel. I think I'll have to wait a very long time before they're worth anything. Maybe I should bury them.

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    2. Back to my Nanna, she gave me a card with 21 shillings stuck on it with the date of each of the 'available' years from 1947 onwards to '68. They are now stuck behind glass in a frame with other old coins Crowns, half crowns etc. My coins in the coin of the terrace.

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  10. Some friends, returning to UK for good, left us with a metal detector. We had a very strong signal by our back door, which is apparently a good sign for lost rings etc. We did find something, after an hour of trying to pinpoint the exact place. An old door hinge.

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    1. When we were lent a detector, the first thing I did was to try to find an old spoon that I'd buried. It refused to acknowledge that anything was there! Useless.

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  11. I like the idea of hiding the coin in your home. Passing some history on. Lovely !

    cheers, parsnip

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    1. As you walk around the house you can just see them poking out from the beams. But you'd have to know they were there.

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