searching the loamy earth

Hello, welcome to my new blog. It will be about reclaiming the scattered memories of those gone before us..... or metal detecting with whimsy and a soul.

This will be a very personal journal, written for my own benefit, but of course if you find my ramblings entertaining so much the better and thank you for reading. If you disagree with anything I say, please remember these are my points of view and I fully accept other folk may have different ideas and agendas.

I am entirely new to metal detecting. So far I have neither a detector or any permissions (that is permission from a landowner to detect on their land). I hope to record my successes and failures, acquisitions and finds on my journey.

Initially I intend to stay afar from the mainline detecting community and go it alone, with the help of my sons. Mainly because I do not have the time to commit to a club (most of which are oversubscribed as it happens), but also I am something of a dreamer and don't want to inflict my flights of fancy on anyone face to face (you dear reader, are another matter). If things change and I need advice or fellow detectorists to talk to, then I will no doubt go seeking them.

I have too many hobbies already, but with this new one, I hope to encapsulate my love of lore and landscape. I also want to champion a breed of underdog which I feel I belong to. Neither scholar nor sensationalist, well educated but poorly qualified, neither one thing nor the other. I have met similar persons and always liked them, and this small post is dedicated to an inspiration of mine, Albany F Major OBE FSA who although certainly erudite and scholarly has been ridiculed and pilloried in the archaeological world since his death in 1926, and the posthumous publication of his book The Mystery of Wansdyke . 

I will discuss A F (the F stands for Featherstonhaugh rather splendidly) Major anon. but I'll leave you with his words that introduce his volume, from which I detect a healthy disregard for his fellow scholars.

the land of england lieth like a mighty palimpset,

deep scored with a record graven from the east to the farthest west,

but the tale that it tells is written in runes that are hard to read,

blurred by the wind and weather and overgrown with weed,

burrowed by mole and rabbit, furrowed by spade and share,

trodden by men and cattle scorched by the summer glare,

fretted by all the breezes, scarred by the winters frost,

drenched by the driving rainstorms when the trees are tempest tossed,

till the learned deem in their wisdom that the tale of those years is lost.

for they hold by their musty parchments and the written word in their pages,

scorning the record that dimly keeps the tale of long vanished ages,

writ on the land in a script unknown to the scholars and sages.