Anecdote
It is 1986 and I’ve arrived at Chisels just as farmer, Mr Sorrell, has pulled up the blade of his deep steel plough and driven his tractor downfield back home for tea and, as I survey the site, I can smell the rich black soil on the evening air.
The feeling I experience on arrival, is similar to the feeling an angler might get on setting up at one of his favourite fishing spots. It is a feeling of excitement and anticipation.
Within 30 seconds, plucked from the moist dark earth, I am turning over a fragment of blackware in my fingers. A shard of pottery made locally by the Durotriges, the Iron Age tribes who lived atop this promontory thousands of years before the Romans invaded our island in 43AD. (2000 years ago). Mass produced and sent all over the Roman world, my shard is probably a little younger, maybe 1700 years old … and part of the remains of the last century of Roman rule. (about 350AD or about 1673 years ago).
Over the years, I have plucked over 200+ roman coins from this field, pacing out, marking and recording every find. I have also amassed a collection of Roman brooches, odd fragments of rings and even a bronze sewing needle with a hole in it. Other finds include; lead loom weights, buckets of Roman and blackware pottery and a very early Neolithic pebble axe, (pitted at one end and probably 3,000 – 4,000 yrs old). A meteorite and more modern medieval finds make up some of the other treasures I have picked up in the black, mineralised soil of the ploughed fields.
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