Stretching The Term 'Metal Detecting'

Hello all!

Im stretching the term because...well, I dont have a metal detector. Sue me. (actually, please dont)

Anyway, story time. In Lyme Regis (great town) there was a landslip which covered up a lot of fossils. The beach was closed for ages, but it reopened when it was declared safe(ish) and it turned out that the landslip had pulled the old town dump into the sea. The beach was littered in assorted things, in the town museum are a selection of such items, bottles, coins, victorian toothbrushes and whatnot. A glass eye was found there, for example.

Anyway, I went down there for fossils and ended up searching the junk. There were many things there, lawnmowers, most of a car, mangles, pipes and everything else. Metal objects I found included hammers and wrenchs, gears, victorian light switches, boat parts etc. I had a load of stuff to bring back but my parents culled it off, so I ended up with the one thing they didnt find, an ornate 1900s clamp. Brass and still in good, working codition, I'm going to be using it as a clamp or maybe a steampunk person would like it, I dont know.

I also got a bunch of bottles, bottle hunters had already gone and taken every nice object exposed but I did dig out quite a few things, ended up taking a Hunt's Dairy bottle which I liked, ill be filling that will pennies and a coke bottle which someone else dug out and left. Not worth anything, but nice none the less. I also kept a marmite jar and some small babyfood jars to use to soak ancients in.

There were earthen ware jars and all sorts of small shaped bottled around which had been rejected by the hunters, my favourite, although I ended up leaving it, was a small honey pot shaped like a hive.

Pictures:
Coke bottle, 1962-9, first bottle to be all printed on instead of raised lettering for 'coke'. Also the only bottle to be labelled 'Coke'. note how much shorter and thinner it is than the modern one beside it.


Hunt's Dairy bottle, with cilit bang at the bottom trying to clean out some algae.



Clamp:




I fully recommend that someone with a metal detector goes down there, sets it to differentiate between iron and other metals, and see what they can find. People used to go onto the beaches and pick up old coins to sell to the antiques dealers, so there is bound to be a lot of cool stuff out there.