Last week Sam Moorhead, the Roman coins advisor for the PAS visited me to spend 2 days identifiying a large assemblage of Roman coins from South Cheshire (and other bits and pieces I saved up as he is so quick at them!). Prior to last week there were 240 Roman coins on the database from Cheshire, on Thursday we identified c.120 more which means we added another 50% again to the coins known from that county. This is particularly useful at the moment as Philippa Walton is doing her Phd looking at the Roman coin data of the PAS.

Most of the coins Sam and I ID’ed are what detectorists would generally regard as ‘grot’ and would perhaps not note where they were found and often don’t record them. However last weeks activity has shown how important recording your ‘grot’ is. In the bag of the coins from Cheshire, only c.5 could not be assigned to a Reece period (the important thing when analysing Roman coin data) and some of the coins were actually really rare and interesting. They aren’t on the database yet but once they go on I will put details up here. Just to whet your appetite, Sam is fairly sure that one of the coins is an unpublished variety!!