As metal detecting sites go, this is one site that benefits from clearing the surface of iron visually before you start, because if you don’t litter pick it will slow you down, and you will never get beyond the frustration of the iron…
Mind you, it’s not that i have found much, whilst detecting this site, it is very slow going, with finds few and far between signals…
“but” “but indeed” ” well maybe just maybe, one day it might pay off”
The first thing i do when i get onto this site is take a walk around the search area because of the amount of iron in the ground… every time it is cultivated, a certain amount of iron is brought to the surface, so by walking around the area with a bucket, i can remove the surface litter… This year i walked around as soon as it was ploughed, then another walk after it was cultivated, this final walk around was when it was sown… I drove by this field when they had just finishing sowing it, which was fortunate… i decided to park up, and do one more sweep of this lower end of the field, as this is where the farmhouse and outbuilding once stood… my son Oliver who was with me also grabbed a bucket as well, [- which turned out to be a good thing -] with eyes glued to the ground, we both walked around, picking up the surface litter, after a while Oliver came over and presented me with this stone he had found, i know it had to be something good “and it was”… predominately flint, but within the flint is a sedimentary rock fossil of a shepherds bonnet, and bursting out from within the heart of the stone is a multi coloured crystal, plus if you look at one section of the stone i think there might be an ammonite within the flint, & left behind as an impression…
a slice has been taken of the edge of the shepherds bonnet in antiquity, which is a shame, but the whole stone is still leaving us with a snapshot of the earth evolving millions of years ago… if we look at this stone properly, it shows us that within this stone, is the Shepard’s Bonnet, which was already fossilised, before being encased with this younger covering of flint, with the geodes of the crystal formed even before the fossil, then the impression of the Ammonite being formed on this later piece of flint… how many millions of years and evolutions has this one piece of stone been through…
Northeast Detectorist 
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