Checking out what lies beneath:

This new enthusiasm has come about after finding this print from 1823:

Its a painting by William Daniell who was an English landscape and marine painter and a member of the Royal Academy. He went round the coast of Britain painting as he went and here is Walmer Castle in 1823 drawn from our cliff line

In those days the cliffs were not the impenetrable jungle they are today and it shows that there was a footpath along the cliffs. We had already found mention in a book that The Duke of Wellington, who lived and died at Walmer Castle, liked to walk along the cliff from the Castle and now, having found this print, it is easier to imagine him doing so. The Duke of Wellington used to walk along our meadows as we do today – that’s quite a thought.

This information, along with the knowledge that the Romans and the Vikings landed in Britain very close to here, mean that seeing if anyone dropped anything over all these hundreds of years is quite appealing. That and the fact that the Mackenzie  Crook television series of Detectorists is one of my all time favourites.

So we have purchased a Garrett EuroAce metal detector, quickly skim read the instructions and off we went

And so what did we find?

A Grolsch tin can, two nails out of horses hooves and some other potentially agricultural bits and pieces. We are quite pleased with our haul because that was our first time out and, if the detector told us something was there, it was invariably right. We need to to go back, read the instructions more thoroughly and spend time honing our skills.

Another thought is that these meadows are also likely to have WWII items buried in them from activity from a radar site close by and the fact that they lie along the line of Bomb Alley. It is to be hoped that we do not discover unexploded munitions.