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Round and About with Colin Sharratt
Welcome….. to this months’ issue of your Newsletter and ‘Round and About feature.
It was noticeable by the number of finds on the table at last months’ meeting that we have arrived at the time of year when most of the fields are in-accessible to us for detecting. There is a lot of fuel wasted and lots of extra mileage put ‘on the clock’ searching for fields in which to detect. Many country lanes, which in the past you never noticed, are driven down in this never-ending search for new fields. The tendency being to beg permission to go on any old field, no matter where it is, as long as the grass is short enough for a days detecting.
This activity seems to stem off the withdrawal symptom commonly known as ‘nondetectoritis’ for a short time. This dreaded complaint plays tricks on the mind of the detectorist at this time of year,in such a way that his thinking starts to drift ( or is it pushed ), into other alternative activities... such as clearing the garage/shed, creosoting the fences, and remarks like " when are you going to clean the boot of the car of all those ‘grotty’ coins, broken buckles, bits of lead ,and old batteries which have lain there for about two years"!!
The only sure remedy for the complaint is the sight of mud on the lanes coming from gateways to fields ( these mud tracks must be followed to ascertain the whereabouts of the farm ), and the site of tractors ploughing fields in the misty distance.
There is a Heaven after all !!!
Len….gets all ‘ Tyred’ out
Had a call recently from a farmer who had been out silaging his fields and had managed to get a tyre caught up in his machinery. His concern was, all the wire re-inforcement of the tyre had got shredded up along with his silage and could I come out and try and retrieve this wire.
Unfortunately, by the time I would have got to the farm it would have been dark, the earliest I could have made it was 6pm the following night.
Not to be deterred, I rang Len Tempest, our retired member and man of leisure. Len, after hearing the details, decided to go and see the farmer early the next day.
All the next day I wondered whether Len had made it, as it turned out to be a lousy day weather wise. Fortunately for Len the silage by this time, all ten loads of it, were now in the barn.
Len, the farmer and a farm hand got down to the business of sifting through the silage with the metal detector and a powerful magnet, picking out piece after piece of the wire from the silage. Len tells me that inside the barn the silage had already began to ‘ferment’ and was giving off lots of heat. It was getting to the point where he thought he’d be stripped down to his underpants. ( not a pretty sight).
After about a couple of hours of frantic searching and filling a bucket with bits of this wire of about 1" long, the farmer weighed up the situation and decided it wasn’t worth the risk of feeding this silage to his animals through the winter.
After a lot of soul searching he decided to remove the whole ten loads of silage from his barn and scrap it rather than run the risk of enormous vets bills if his animals swallowed this wire.
My most grateful thanks to Len for giving up his own time and effort to help this farmer in the best way he could. By using his metal detector responsibly. Thanks Len.
BUT WELL WORTH THE EFFORT!!