Ciorstaidh and i went to the Minelab owners rally at Corfe Castle (Dorset) last weekend. The rally has taken place over a weekend in September for several years now and there have been some very interesting discoveries. Two of these, a Roman patera (a copper alloy cooking vessel resembling a modern saucepan) and a hoard of late Iron Age staters, prompted the finders to get in touch with the Dorset County Museum and subsequently the Norden Archaeological Project was set up by Peter Woodward, the museum’s curator of archaeology. Survey and small scale excavation have been undertaken by the Dorset County Museum and Terrain Archaeology in order to put the finds into context and discover more about how they came to be where they were found.

This year, two fields were examined in detail by the archaeological project. Fieldwalking was organised concurrently with the metal detecting rally and a structured detecting survey took place. All the discoveries in two fields were marked by the detectorists on the rally and then each find was given a number and the findspot recorded with a total station or a hand-held GPS. All these finds will go to the Dorset County Museum. Several other fields were also detected by the c. 70 Minelab owners who attended the rally and about 100 finds were recorded by PAS and David Connelly, who used a hand-held GPS to pinpoint findspots.

About 75 of these finds will go onto the PAS database; the remainder were post-1700. Finds recorded in detail included medieval hammered coins, post-medieval tokens, a small number of Roman coins and one Roman brooch.