Images from Martin Green’s Museum at Down Farm,near Sixpenny Handley Martin has his own museum on the small family farm which is part of the Chase, just south of Salisbury and where his family has farmed for generations. The museum displays local archaeological finds, a small rural life collection and geological specimens mainly from the Dorset coast. The farm not only contains the Neolithic Dorset Cursus, numerous long barrows and Hambledon Hill, but over the last 30 years Henges, Shafts, Plastered Houses, Land Divisions, Enclosures and Cemetries have been identified and excavated by Martin

He featured on the BBC 2 history series Meet the Ancestors after finding a 5,000-year-old sacrificial burial site on the farm. He dug up four skeletons, which DNA testing showed were a 30-year-old woman, her five-year-old daughter and two other children.

Claypotts Castle

16th century z plan tower house – the ‘Tower Fortalice and Mannor Place’ of Claypotts was built between 1569 and 1588 by John Strachan or Strathauchin, a cadet branch of Strachan of Angus and Thornton in the Mearns

Dirleton Castle

13th century castle built by the De Vaux family around 1225, it was one of the most formidable castles of its time. However, it was captured by an English army under Bishop Anthony Bek of Durham and was only recovered by Robert the Bruce in 1311. Bruce pulled down much of the castle to ensure the English armies could not make future use of it. Rebuilt by the Halyburton family in the 14th C., who added a new gatehouse, kitchen and Great Hall, and further augmented by the Ruthven family (15th C), but destroyed once again by General Monk (1650). It passed to the Nisbet family (1663), but was quickly abandoned as a residence in favour their new and more comfortable house at Archerfield. Stone was looted from the site to build houses and walls in the local area.

Early indications suggest that the first use of this site may have occurred  during the Neolithic period, some 5,000 – 6,000 years ago. This earliest phase of activity is represented by a single cremation deposit (a small pit containing cremated human skeletal remains) which was deposited on a slight raised hillock in the landscape.

Some time later, probably as much as 1,000 years later (c. 2,000BC), a richly endowed single burial chamber was constructed on this slight natural knoll (cist L on plan, see end of this update note). A single young male (c.10-15 years old) was buried in this stone-lined chamber, and the whole structure was enclosed with a boundary ditch (it is possible that the grave was then covered by a massive earthen mound).

We know about this primary burial only from historic records and from the excavation evidence of a robbed out grave. Essentially, it appears that in 1944, a grave was accidentally discovered on this site during deep ploughing. No serious attempt was made to excavate or to examine the grave upon discovery and the site was left open for the curious to come and examine it for themselves. As a result, the grave site was essentially looted. Indeed, when, almost six months after discovery, a team of antiquarian/archaeologists from the National Museum of Antiquities (Edinburgh) came to visit the site, all that was found was a single fusiform jet bead and some fragments of disarticulated human bone.

This unfortunate situation came about despite the then landowner’s (Mr Christie of Durie House) determined attempts to have the site protected and properly excavated. Indeed, our only knowledge of this original discovery all due to Mr RL Christie’s diligent and responsible estate and record keeping and the preservation of his notes by his son and heir, Mr Peter Christie, who kindly relayed the details of the 1944 discovery to the Council’s Archaeological Unit.

Some time after the construction of the primary grave chamber on this site, a further five well constructed and richly endowed burials were placed surrounding the central grave. However, these were still all contained within the enclosure ditch .

At a slightly later period, but probably not later than 1,500BC, another four burials were interred just outside (and to the south) of the cemetery enclosure . The quality of the construction of these grave chambers and the quality and number of grave goods was significantly lower than the early earlier burials on this site. However, the fact that these individuals had still been marked out for burial within a stone chamber and within a cemetery complex, still means that these individuals must have been exceptionally important people within their Bronze Age communities.

Images of St Mary the Virgin, Farleigh, Surrey St Mary the Virgin at Farleigh is one of a few churches which remain largely unaltered structurally in the area. The nave and chancel date from c 1100 but was extended in c 1250.

The nave windows are Norman. The West porch is possibly 16th century although the West door is Norman. The bell turret is 19th century and the roof is relatively modern. The exterior of the building is stuccoed.

Kinneil Parish Church
Only the western gable of the church, with its double belfry, now remains standing. The church formerly served a large parish, including the medieval village of Kinneil, the site of which lies in the meadow to the south. The building dates back to the 12th century, probably nuilt by Herbertus, Chamberlain to the King. Herbertus granted “the Church of Kinneil with all its dues and tithes, lands, wood and plain, pasture and meadow” to Holyrood Abbey. One of its surviving bells, on display in Kinneil Museum, is dedicated to St Catherine

Aberuchill, Tayside

17th century L plan structure with angle turrets and a circular stair tower in the re-entrant angle. There are unusual twin gables at roof level. 3 storeys high with an attic – the walls are harled and whitewashed. A Georgian two storey and attic wing was added around 1805. In Rob Roy’s day the Laird of Aberuchill still thought it prudent to pay the outlaw “mail” or protection money despite the fact that he was Lord Justice Clerk to ensure his cattle wouldnt be stolen! His son Sir James Campbell stopped paying this protection money and Rob Roy himself arrived at Aberuchill during a dinner party forcing Sir James to pay the traditional premium.

Mesolithic: 8,300 BC to 4,500 BC
Early, -8300 to -6500 Late, -6500 to -3500

Neolithic: 3500 BC to 2100 BC As far as artefacts are concerned, the Neolithic is usually split into Early and Late; Middle Neolithic is generally only used for monuments.

Early, -3500 to -2900 Middle, -2900 to -2500 Late, -2500 to -2100

There is an overlap of 50 years for the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age

Bronze Age: 2150 BC to 800 BC
Early, -2150 to -1500 Middle, -1500 to -1150 Late, -1150 to -800

Iron Age: 800 BC to 100 AD
Early, -800 to -300 Late, -300 to 100

There is an overlap of up to a century (depending on which part of the country you are in) during which artefacts can be either culturally Roman or culturally Iron Age.

Roman: 1 AD to 410 AD
Early, 1 to 200 Late, 200 to 410

There is an overlap of at least a decade (depending on which part of the country you are in) during which artefacts can either be culturally Roman or culturally early-medieval.

Early-Medieval: 400 AD to 1066 AD Early, 400-720 Middle, 720-850 Late, 850-1066

In general, you will be able to date things more closely than this. Most early Anglo-Saxon object types will be quoted as mid fifth to mid sixth century (450-550), or late fifth or sixth century (475-600). Thereafter, dates tend to be quoted in centuries.

Medieval: 1066 AD to 1500 AD Late, 1400-1500?

‘Early medieval’ (soon after the Norman Conquest) can be hard to distinguish from ‘early-medieval’ (before the Norman Conquest). The term ‘middle medieval’ is not used. There is debate as to what constitutes the late medieval period. It is best to stick simply to ‘medieval’ and qualify it using calendar dates.

Post-Medieval: 1500 onwards Early, 1500-1600/1700

Early post-medieval is generally used for the 16th century and sometimes for the 17th century. The comments for the medieval period also apply here.

There is debate as to the relationship between ‘post-medieval’ and ‘modern’.

Modern: 1800 to the present day
PAS do not use early, middle and late qualifiers for this period

Designed by Corinne Mills 2005
email [email protected]

Mode Switch

Prospecting

In my opinion the prospecting mode is not the best to use when searching for small coins in the UK, in tests I did, this mode would reject small coins if any iron was close by, as the discrimination in this mode is working on the percentage of iron in the target, and always seemed to favour the iron over a nonferrous target that was close to it, can be used if you pay careful attention to the meter readings, but this takes great patience and slows you down to a crawl, therefore reducing your finds rate dramatically

Coins/Jewellry

This mode to me is more for general coin shooting in parks, picnic area’s etc., where pushing the trigger forward in this mode will reject some types of pull tab, with trigger in centre you get the conventional discrimination, where the audio will be suppressed on any target that’s set to be rejected on the dual control, I found this mode needed the gain to be set carefully to get the best out of it, I have used this mode with success on farmland, but found I had to use reduced gain for best performance on my sites.

Relic

This is the one I find a real killer on UK farmland, very sharp and sensitive, with the trigger in the centre position you get a low tone for ferrous and high tone for nonferrous, this gives a lot of feedback on what’s under the coil without having to check the meter, I found if I set the threshold at about the 9oclock position I could use this mode with gain set at +3 most of the time without the machine getting erratic, this mode is what gave this machine the reputation of being “noisy”, its not that the machine chatters but the fact it gives a signal for every target, after a while you get used to the constant low tone farts and the high tones really do bang through when over most good targets, but like some other machines you sometimes get an iffy high tone signal, I found the best way to treat these signals was to see if I could get any kind of “two way” signal from them while moving around the target, if I could I’d dig the target, if I could only get a “one way” signal I’d leave it, obviously at first I checked a lot of the one wayers to be sure, 99% turned out to be iron, not a bad percentage, scraping some soil off the surface with your boot to get the coil closer to the target can also help suss out iffy signals.
If the constant low tones are annoying to anyone its just a case of pushing the trigger forward, which switches the machine to the standard discrimination mode where the audio is suppressed on all rejected targets, again I found I had to reduce gain in this mode, I didn’t notice any real loss in performance by doing this though, so its really a matter of personal choice as to whether you want to hear the iron or not.

Dual Control/Discrimination

This setting is the most important when hunting those small thin hammered, Saxon sceats etc., until you get to know the machine a setting of around 2.5 should be about right, at that setting the machine won’t discrim out even a cut quarter hammered, but will take care of all but the largest iron, after getting to grips with the machine I found it best to set the discrim up using a three inch nail, I balance the machine and then lock the tracking, placing the machine on something nonmetallic I pass the nail over the coil about two inches away, turn up the discrim until the nail is just rejected when its passed over the coil in the horizontal and vertical position, on my machine that’s about the 1.9 mark, this can vary quite a bit from machine to machine, using to much discrimination can cause target masking on iron laden sites, although the lightning fast recovery speed on this machine helps separate the targets, also the more you increase the discrim the more depth you will lose, as the old saying say’s “the more you use the more you lose”, and anybody who digs no iron at all, is definitely leaving finds in the ground.

Gain Control

This controls the sensitivity of the received signal only, as the transmit power uses a fixed setting, i don’t think many people realise this and think that raising the gain actually pumps more power out on the transmit side, it just adjust’s the gain on the receive side and overdoing this setting on bad ground can distort the audio signal without actually gaining any depth at all, in fact you can lose some of the fainter signals because they wouldn’t be heard over the extra noise generated, the gain setting obviously has an effect over the depth at which a target can be heard, it has a big affect on the stability of the machine, especially when detecting on very mineralised ground and/or ground that has a high amount of iron present. The MXT has what I call the standard 0 to 10 gain/sensitivity setting, it also incorporates three + numbers, moving into the + numbers also starts to boost the machines audio, which helps to pick out those faint deep targets. There may be times when working in severe ground conditions that a setting of 6-7 is needed to keep the machine stable, but in general I would always advise to try and set the gain to at least +1 if at all possible without distorting the audio, in the 0-10 range the audio to me sounds a bit weak (may be my bad hearing lol), then again when increasing to the +3 mark, the audio can be very loud, so its pretty vital to have a decent pair of headphones with a volume control, the volume control on full when working in the 0-10 range, and reduced a couple of notches when in the plus numbers, this works well for me with my nugget-buster phones, which are pretty loud on most machines.

Although experienced user’s of the MXT will want to take advantage of the added depth gained by using high gain settings on good ground, I would advise newcomers to the machine to use reduced gain to start with, as this will give a “cleaner” signal and more positive discrimination.

Trac

The MXT has a very fast auto-trac system, under normal conditions this is best left in the ground position, although the manual states to “pump” the coil up and down to set the tracking, its so fast that two or three swings over a clean piece of ground will soon have it setup, you’ll hear the machine settle down as you swing, even if you forget the ground balance procedure before you start, the machine will find the optimum setting before you’ve gone a couple of yards.

In highly mineralised ground or ground that contains a lot of iron debris, I found it best to “lock” the tracking, this prevents small deep targets being tracked out under these conditions, it will also quieten the machine down as the tracking is not continually “hunting” for the optimum setting with iron under the coil, afraid I can’t comment on the salt setting as I’ve never tried the MXT on the beach.

Threshold

For the newcomer this is best set so the hum is just audible, and adjust the gain while detecting so the threshold is reasonably stable, after getting used to the machine you can try the trick mentioned above, turning the threshold to about the 9oclock position so its set just below sound, then turn up the gain to get top performance out of the machine, high gain settings will generate some background noise but I found the increase in performance outweighed having to put up with some slight noise, setting the threshold just below sound is just like using silent search on the DFX, doing this hides a lot of the noise generated by using high gain levels below the threshold, without losing any performance, there’ll always be a trade off for running a machine on very low discrim settings coupled with high gain, but when testing this machine on my sites it was one of the few that actually performed better when set to run “hot”.

Meter

I found it best to treat all meters as mainly just a gimmick, ok their handy for giving battery voltage, and i use mine to suss out coke when its a big problem on a site, it will accurately give a 0 reading on most coke, this is mainly because the vast majority of coke is near the surface and the meter can id it correctly, if you get an iffy signal in your headphones its no good looking at the meter for help, as the meter uses the same signal as the audio, an iffy signal in the phones will give an erratic reading on the meter, i mentioned earlier my way of dealing with iffy signals. You may hear people who use multi-tone id say that you should pass different metals over the coil to get used to the tone they give off, this is all well and fine, but when those same objects are buried in mineralised soil, probably with iron close by the tone they give may well be completely different, or even several tones together (duelling banjo’s lol), also the depth of a target can change the tone it gives, thankfully the MXT has only two tones, ferrous and nonferrous surely that’s all we need to know, i certainly don’t want to know what type of nonferrous metal it is when getting a high tone, digging it out not knowing is half the fun.

The labels on the MXT i.e.: button, buckle, bullet etc. are more for the American market, and a bit of a joke in my opinion, so if you must use the meter use the vdi numbers, and only when you get a good clean high tone, as that’s when they are most accurate.

Tips

Coke

Coke can be a big problem on some of our sites, but using the meter you can eliminate most of it, I would never be tempted to discriminate coke completely out, as this could eliminate some tiny coins, if I’m on a site with a coke problem I check every high tone on the meter, a loud high tone with a meter reading of 0 and showing foil will be coke, a faint or iffy high tone that gives a two way signal and a reading of 0 should be dug, some will be small pieces of coke but others have turned out to be fairly deep cut hammered, using this method you can eliminate around 90% of the coke and lose very few finds.

Iron stone (hot rock)

Iron stone or hot rocks as the Americans call them can be a big problem for some machines, not so the MXT, they give a double bouncing signal nothing like a good target signal, also the meter after a slight delay will show hot rock, if in doubt they can be checked in pinpoint mode, the signal will null when the coil is centred over the hot rock.

Iron

The whites machines in my mind have discrimination second to none, but like most machines will give a good signal on certain shaped iron and any iron object with a hole in it i.e.: steel washers, iron rings, horseshoes etc., although these give a low tone its usually accompanied by a good high tone as well, you can suss out most of the large iron by switching to pinpoint mode, large iron gives a very wide signal even if buried deep, got to be careful though, a hoard in an iron pot would also give a wide signal lol, personally I dig these signals and have found some interesting iron artefacts by doing so, better to be safe than sorry.

Coils

The three coils I’ve decided to keep for my MXT are the 5.3 eclipse, the 10 X 5 elliptical, and the 14 X 8 elliptical.
The 14 incher has replaced the 9.5 stock coil on my machine, covers a lot of ground with no loss of sensitivity to small finds, only gets defeated when the iron gets heavy, the only drawbacks I’ve found with this coil so far are it doesn’t like to get within thirty yards of anything electrical, and it’s a tad on the heavy side, mind you I personally have got used to the weight now, and have got through a few six hour sessions with no problems, even though I’m not built like a brick outhouse lol, I’ve found this coil very stable even on max gain, and I reckon its added a good three inches at least to the depth of the MXT, you do get more low tones with this coil as it can sense more of the deeper iron, also more high tone “chirps” as the coil approaches the edge of iron, luckily these chirps are only one way and can be safely left, I reckon this coil is a must for the MXT/DFX.

The 10 X 5 elliptical is the choice if the iron gets heavy, its narrow footprint limiting the amount of iron under the coil at one time, therefore target masking isn’t a big problem, again being a DD coil its not affected by bad ground like a concentric coil can be, another must have coil in my opinion, its always returned a higher finds rate on my sites than the 9.5 stock coil.

Finally the little 5.3 concentric coil, I love using this coil on stiff stubble, being a round solid coil its fairly easy to brush through the stubble, although a bit more weight would help, good depth too for a small coil, also use it to check heavy iron patches that I’ve been over with my other coils, surprising what it can pull out if used slowly.
There is also a small DD shooter coil, haven’t found the need to purchase one, but did try one for a couple of hours a few months ago, personally I couldn’t see any advantage over the 5.3 coil.

Detecting Sites & Hotspots

Every half decent field where we hope to find those ancient coins/artefacts will have a few “hotspots”, these usually consist of patches of soil large and small containing man made iron debris, a variety of stages of decomposition will be found, from tiny particles to large chunks, these “hotspots” believe it or not are the detectorists best friend, they show clearly where most activity has taken place on a particular field possibly over many hundreds of years. Now these “hotspots” may well be the detectorists best friend but their certainly not the detectors friend, many detectors are rendered useless by these patches of iron, the MXT takes them in its stride, especially with the correct coil fitted and settings to suite the conditions. Over the years I’ve seen detectorists avoid these hotspots like the plague when their machines have become erratic and unusable, or the user can’t put up with a bit of chatter from their machine, the trouble is by avoiding such places their missing out on the very spots that hold the vast majority of finds on farmland. When I had more time to spend detecting a few years ago, I used to do what I call a union jack search of a new site, this entailed putting a large coil on my machine and searching the field fairly quickly from corner to corner then side to side etc, marking down on a home made map of the field where the hotspots were, for use on subsequent visits.

Nowadays I start with the 9.5 stock coil (now replaced with the 14 inch DD), as I find a hotspot I detect it very slowly to get the easier targets, then mark the spot on the map for future reference, I’d normally do the whole field in this way, returning in the future armed with smaller coils to check out the really heavy iron laden patches that the large coil couldn’t cope with, and to winkle out the tiny coins etc that the iron masked from the larger coil, this exercise is repeated each year as the plough stirs up the iron and finds.

Technique

There’s only one way to go here, sloooow and slower still, I always swing the coil straight across the front, covering about a three foot width rather than in an wide semi circle, this way I find I can cover every inch of ground, cos if you miss a small piece of ground, you can bet it will hold a find of a lifetime lol, just covering a three foot search path also ensures the coil doesn’t lift at the end of the swing, and the obvious one, keep the coil as near to the ground as conditions allow, on grass and growing cereal crops etc you can scrub the ground for maximum depth.

My personal settings

Mode: Relic
Trac: Set to ground position ( balanced on clean ground and locked if working a heavy iron site)
Dual Control (Disc): 1.9 (Varies from one machine to another, just high enough to eliminate a 3” nail)
Gain +3
Trigger: Centre Position (2 tone id)
Threshold: Just below the point of sound (around the 9 o’clock position on my machine)

Good hunting.

Designed by Corinne Mills 2005
email [email protected]