It's a trip!: Holy metal dectector, Batman!

09 October 2005

Holy metal dectector, Batman!

I love living here! We have friends up from Cornwall for the weekend, and they brought a metal detector with them. This is the Mac Daddy of metal detectors--it tells you what type of metal it's found, how deep it's buried and loads of other stuff. It rocks!

This morning, being the amateur archaeologists that we are, we were searching out in our garden with the pimped out detector. Our house is very old, so we always have hopes of finding something cool out there. And today we did.

Shannon found a coin. It was really dirty, and had stuff corroded (for lack of a better word) onto the surface, both front and back. After quite a lot of cleaning we were able to read the words and had cleared off most of the images on both sides. Then, of course, we googled it.

It's a 1794 half-penny token from Lackington, Allen & Co booksellers. (That sort of token was the period equivalent of a gift certificate; it was good for the amount shown, but only at the specified location.) James Lackington had a HUGE bookstore (scroll about halfway) in Finsbury Sq in London in the late 1700s and sold over 100,000 books a year--no mean feat back then.

I'm so excited! We'll be going out again this afternoon looking for more buried treasure---WISH US LUCK!

posted by Julie at 1:52 PM 8 comments

8 Comments:

Anonymous said...: Oh that is SO cool!! I want to come play too!; Sun Oct 09, 06:52:00 PM GMT+1
Anonymous said...: That is TOO COOL. Have you considered eBay? :); Sun Oct 09, 07:51:00 PM GMT+1
Jen said...: I am impressed!

You should try it in your house. Maybe there's more under the floors than just snails?; Sun Oct 09, 10:19:00 PM GMT+1
Melody said...: How Cool!; Mon Oct 10, 04:46:00 PM GMT+1
Anita said...: That's awesome! It makes me want to go buy a pimped out metal detector of my own . . .of course, where I live there is no way we'd find anything cool that that. Do you know what it is worth?; Tue Oct 11, 12:00:00 PM GMT+1
mommyguilt said...: That is very very cool! Sadly, my house isn't even 100 yrs old, so there's no cool stuff underneath or around it. Have you found out the current worth of the coin?; Tue Oct 11, 04:06:00 PM GMT+1
Julie said...: Nope, we never found anything else--after two more days of searching. The coin was not worth much--other than it was cool to find in my yard!--we found one on ebay.co.uk for about 7 pounds or 13 dollars. Oh well, we'll try again next time she comes up! :); Thu Oct 13, 08:35:00 AM GMT+1
Michael Downes said...: Hi
I'd like to reproduce images of that coin for my blog at http://budleighbrewsterunited.blogspot.com/ Hope that's ok. Will credit your blog.

I'm writing from Budleigh Salterton, Devon. Lackington died there in 1815.; Mon Aug 10, 07:50:00 PM GMT+1