My latest treasure find is a Bronze Age founder’s cache consisting of broken axes and ingots – some twenty pieces in total. Bronze was a very valuable material 3000 years ago and the founder would have buried it for safe keeping until he wanted to use it to make new axes and other tools. Although not precious metal and of nominal intrinsic value, the find qualifies as potential treasure under the UK Treasure Act on account of its historical importance. I found the first part of the cache (as photo) in wintertime, quite unexpectedly as there are, of course, no real leads to anything this old. As such, I wasn’t using the camera but I was using a dowsing rod, which led me right to the main area of the scattered cache at the start of my metal detector search of this section of the field. I recovered twelve pieces on the first occasion. A week or so later the temperature had risen sufficiently to make use of the IR camera as I wanted to know if the main part of the cache was still in the ground. Although I had a weak aura from where I had recovered the Bronze Age material so far, there was no indication that there was a substantial amount of material in one place, waiting to be recovered. Extensive metal detecting of the area has so far recovered nine more very scattered pieces of the cache.
