How do you fancy spending Easter Saturday and Sunday in 80 acres of bean fields? Bean fields with a history? Centrally placed in England, never been searched before - except the time last Christmas when the artefact grabfest removed from the archaeological record lots of nice collectable and saleable finds including a nice couple of nicely enamelled Roman brooches, a nice votive axe and many more really nice bits. That's nice. In fact so nice that at the time of writing there are several nice archaeological trenches in an adjacent field. Apparently the site figures quite prominently in the Historic Environment Record which has nicely been made available for artefact hunters to take their pick. There was an archaeological survey here in the 1990s, "The Raunds Area Project”, so that's nice because it means artefact hunters will know precisely which areas to target. Which is nice. There's a nice big Bronze Age henge here, so maybe some nice votive metalwork in the offing, which will be nice. Then there is a nice Iron Age settlement here with roundhouses. So that means there'll be some more nice finds to hoik out. There's ring ditches visible on the aerial photographs, so you can even do a nice bit of grave-robbing if they are levelled barrows. That's nice, isn't it? The site is situated next to a nice old Roman track, so there's bound to be nice stuff that was dropped or lost there (or maybe "hoards hidden on the way to battle", eh?). This road was later used to link the deserted village of Mallows Cotton to the deserted village of West Cotton which then linked to Raunds or Rants as it was in the Doomsday Book. That's nice, because the bean fields run right up to the edge of one of those deserted medieval villages (but there will be archaeological material to be had beyond the edge) and they actually cover the site of West Cotton, so there will be nice crotal bells and other nice Medieval metalwork to dig out galore, lots of nice hammered coins too no doubt. In fact so nice Central Plunderers are having another commercial artefact grabfest in those beanfields on Saturday. Don't forget to pay them the sixty quid and bring your metal detector.Oh, if you find archaeological finds you do not want for your collection, do not UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, rebury them where you found them for archaeologists to find and interpret, you must put them in the yellow bins to be provided and the rally organizers will take them away for melting down or dumping.
Oh, and by the way, the farm is part of some pesky environmental stewardship scheme financed out of public funds, but that's OK, it does not cover the historic environment at all (hooray!! That's nice) but just to keep up the appearance of being environmentally conscious don't go on the grass margins or wooded areas - at least not while anyone is looking. These are protected areas and are out of bounds. But all the rest of the fields are fair game. Come and help empty the archaeology out onto eBay.
The PAS FLO will not be present, she said she has had enough of legitimising rampant plundering of known archaeological sites every weekend. She's staying at home and catching up with her reading and gardening. Might go out for a meal in the evening with some friends instead of sitting in a dark damp field with beer-swilling foul-mouthed blokes.
[The rally is, unfortunately, very real. I made up the bit about the FLO, she's probably going to attend the rally, they generally do, it's how they boost the finds in the database numbers - through the rifling of sites like those at Raunds - a very significant project in its time, but checking its results will be near impossible by the time this lot have hoovered and dug their selfish way across part of the site, taking away the best bits, discarding the rest. When is Britain going to put a stop to this manner of treating areas of archaeological importance?]