Nice! I slightly knew a slightly shady guy who had actually grown up in Wales (hadn’t thought about this in years) and had been in a variety of different professions (ahem), usually things that could be done on the side and off the books while he and/or his wife-partner worked in regular jobs. And they moved around a lot.
He once spent a summer in Gibraltar, and paid for it by free diving near the swimmers’ raft anchored a bit offshore, during the middle of the day (good Sun angle), recovering lost Rolex watches, phones, and whatnot.
He had long been a detectorist in Britain. He told me about the “birdfoot” — when the Romans’ bridges were gone, carted off for stone, ruined, etc, the approach to the fording place was naturally downhill, and angled off the old (usually Roman-origin) roadway to get down to the crossing at a very slight incline, to avoid runaway carts and whatnot. He figured out via experience (and accident) that this near-ancient practice tended to point right to a fruitful spot to detect.
And that part of the story is the most interesting, but I can’t remember it. [blush]
That’s brilliant figuring the downhill incline would be a good place to hunt!
We were comparing his finds in the Western US (few artifacts earlier than about 1860 — seem to have largely been brought west by Civil War veterans), the Eastern US (things dating back up to 400 years) and finds in the UK and Europe (up to 2000 or more years). Rather slim pickins out here in the West.