Jun 16th, 2015

Author: donich_admin

Wonderful things….

My friend J was over here on Saturday night. Just when he was leaving he produced a fantastic surprise.
J comes from Norfolk, and his late father was a fieldsman. Norfolk is actually the number one place in the UK for archaeological discoveries per square mile, and J has inherited a lot of things his father either picked up or collected.
So on Saturday he showed us some of them. I’m very interested in ancient history, and at the moment I am particularly involved with the Bronze age. The picture shows the bronze age spearhead J brought. It is approx 3500 years old and so beautifully and exactly made that it could almost have been machine tooled. I got a huge thrill out of just holding it and thinking of the smith who made it and the warriors who used it before it got dropped (in a battle? or carried away stuck in a hunted animal?) and lay in a Norfolk field for thousands of years.
Anyway, that was the star attraction – but he also showed us a Neolithic hand axe, flint tools, a Roman coin, coins from treasure trove etc. etc.
Pretty thrilling really. I bought a metal detector last year but have never used it – so this has given me some impetus to break it out and use it. There is a tumbledown pile of rocks over at the other side of the Donich, which (believe it or not) was a thriving YMCA holiday camp in 1930s. A friend of mine who is a local historian had asked the current YMCA if they had any artefacts stored from it – but apparently they destroyed them all in 1970s. So if I could find anything that would be great – the campers all wore enamelled metal badges so that might be a good thing to look for.