DetectingWales.com

I once had a newspaper business and called at houses once a month to collect their bills. Bert Jones, a retired farmer, told me this.Thought you might llike it, every word is true except the Christian name of the farmer. In 1981 he was harrowing a field ( breaking down the soil after ploughing). A large branch on the ground got stuck in the harrow so he stopped the tractor. As he pulled out the branch he saw a couple of small brown discs on the ground. He picked them up and then smoothed away some of the topsoil to find a few more, then more. He told me  'I just pushed my arm into the soil and I could feel the coins all around me. I threw them up in the air ' Then he ran back to the farm to get a bucket. He eventually dug out all the coins and the pot they were buried in, though it was broken in several pieces.
                    No one ever knew how many Roman coins there were, but they were all bronze and all in very fine condition. The Treasure Trove laws at the time did not apply to bronze finds, so as he owed quite a bit to the bank, Bert sold a lot of the coins to a well known dealer. He showed me the receipt for £9,000 for 4,600 coins. Quite a nice price at the time but the coins were really fine. Bert owed a lot to the bank so hurried off with his cheque to see the bank manager. The manager wouldn't see him, Bert was a bad tempered soand so when he wanted to be and I guess the manager had seen enough of him. After refusing to leave the bank, the manager agreed to see him, didn't lift his head form his work as Bert walked in. He told me 'I just lifted the cheque over my head and whacked it down on his desk. He had to look up then, switched on his intercom and said Miss.......bring two coffees and some biscuits in as soon as you can ... Money talks you know.'
                Bert had kept quite a lot of the coins for himself and over time I saw three small boxes with 50 or 100 coins in each, all really beautiful condition. He told me he had a much bigger box but I never saw that. He also still had the pot the coins had been buried in, he'd glued the pieces together. As he was now really badly racked with arthritis, I did the occasional odd job for him and at Christmases posted small packages to his various relatives in Australia. He had always filled out the customs forms correctly and perfectly truthfully '50 Roman coins. 10 Roman coins' etc. As far as I know, these were all allowed to go on their way untouched by Customs, this would be mid 1990s.
              Bert told me that apart from needing the money, he had no wish to give the coins to the local museum as his father, who had found a small hoard in the 1930s, had done this. Bert had been to the museum a couple of times to see the coins but they told him they couldn't find them.
                           Over time his arthritis became much worse, he never answered the door, it was left open for me to walk in.If I knocked at the door I'd just get 'Come ....... in. I've got ......arthritis, can't ..... move.'  He'd be sitting in his armchair wearing nothing but the top half of his pyjamas, quite unbothered, then he'd give me a half hour lecture on farming or coins. (it would have been about 10 minutes less if he'd cut out the swear words). Often I'd have to help him out of his chair and this obviously hurt him so much, the air was blue with his curses. He died about 1997, wife then came back from Australia where she'd been seeking refuge, she died a couple of years after that. The family now run the farm and I'm told they would want all finds a detectorist might make, but the farmer next door to him has approached me asking if i'd like to detect the field that adjoins the one where Bert made his find. Guess I might do that.
                   
                 

What a great read!! Thank you