'A Very Significant Find'
By Alan Meek

Previous: 'There just might be, yes, there it is...'

With my foot, I move an inch or so of soil aside, then I listen again. Stronger - iffy still, but stronger. I watch the needle - we're an inch or two closer now - and the ten-year-old technology begins to interpret what it's being fed. The audio and the needle tell me it could be a cut or broken hammered piece; that it could be a 12bore at a certain stage of disintegration; that it could very well be a wodge of screwed-up silver-paper, or part of a chopped-up meat-pie container, or one of at least several other things. Well, thanks a bunch - that really narrows it down.

But of course, it does, quite a bit. I'm sure now that it isn't iron. I'm almost certain it isn't bronze; but it's probably silvery and tatty, and perhaps most of all, it has all the feel of being quite a long way down. And I - we - could quite well be totally wrong on all counts.
And all that, since the first almost subliminal signal, took, maybe thirty seconds of real time. And now it's time to dig. Foot assisted at first. My back problem lets me use my smallish spade in a standing/bending sort of way for not very long - then I have to kneel, and do the rest from there. And good or bad, after I've levered myself back to a standing position, I choose a new mark, and move on.

But not this time. Two spadefulls - kneel down - run the machine over the spoil - zilch - check the hole - signal still there, but stronger. Where am I? Not much short of a foot down. And that is really quite deep. Use the spadepoint as nearly like a scalpel as I can - now I have it....., and it's rubbish. It's a screwed-up handful of tin-foil. Black, soft, and weighs nothing, except for the earth it's choked with. Well, at least my trusty Toltec knew - it had said that screwed-up tin-foil was a probable. So I chucked it on the spoil, and well, because I always do, I dropped the search-head into the hole again - just to check.

And, yes, there was still a signal - same sound - and did I really want another handful of, well, whatever sort of scrunched-up foil this was? No, I really didn't. So, still kneeling, I scraped the spoil back into the hole and I tamped it down as neatly as we always do. Then I reached out and picked up the rubbish signal - tinfoil, whatever it was; thought I’d leave it on the on the fresh-turned soil I'd just replaced it and pick it up later for the junk bucket.

But the October sun - or my little angel - had taken some of the water from my find, and in drying, some of the earth had fallen away. And as I looked at it, I thought, 'if I were really stupid, I could almost think that roundy bit at the end there, with the plough-slice through it, could be a head.'

So I turned it over - this six inch long, screwed-up wodge of black and brittle tinfoil - and I saw, was sure I could see - a cloak. A head, a cloak, and part of an arm - from a signal which had suggested something silverish, and which had come from about as deep as detectors go. I sat back on my heels; bemused - gobsmacked - whatever; in my hands was what I now knew had to be a silver statue; in a terrible condition it's true - but it was almost, absolutely certainly, Roman. And that doesn’t happen to a lot of detectorists.

Next: 'Magical beyond belief'