Brother, can you spare a groat?
At a country show this weekend, we fell in with a group of very enthusiastic metal detectorists. They had some astonishing finds — although, if you read the labels, it was over quite an extended time period. I think one has a long wait between astonishing finds.
Many of them were probably votive offerings – small objects thrown into water for religious reasons. We…don’t really know much about this. My favorite of these — I was an idiot and didn’t get a picture — was a tiny head of a…well, I thought it was a wolf at first. But it either had three horns, or two standy-up ears and a single horn growing out of the center of its forehead. So! Either a wolf unicorn or, much more likely, the debbil.
I wonder who was trying to conjure that boi out of the brackish water and why?
Inset: a very good Henry VII silver groat. I love groats. Probably because I love saying ‘groat’. They were worth four pence and fell out of use in the Nineteenth C.
Uncle B bought me a metal detector when we first moved here. Then I discovered most of the land around is protected conservation land, no detectoring allowed. So I scanned our garden and found a few rusty nails. No groat for me!
August 13, 2019 — 9:02 pm
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