Question, whats the best thing or things you ever found without a detector?

Dark Chameleon

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Whats the best thing you ever found without hunting with your detector?.

We stumble by things all the time, eye ball finds we call them but what's your best one?.

Number One

When I was young I found a torpedo in Dornoch Firth beach in Scotland, my dad wouldn't let me take it home, not cos it would explode, the side had been ripped out but cos we'd have needed a crane to get it into our little 4 berth caravan and do it without anyone noticing...lol

Number Two

When I was slightly older I was walking around the countryside like kids my age do on weekends before we have motorbikes or cars and I found a chunk of metalwork, which turned out to be part of a former underground power cable which had been left, it was basically loads of thick shiny copper wrapped around each other with a solid lead casing with like a grease paper between them, I spend the next couple of days separating them and then weighed them in for three weeks pocket money, from one find.

Number Three

When I was in my early 20's I was working in a quarry, drilling and pry baring out stones that could sometimes be more then 20 tons (those ones got drilled till they were about 3 tons so the machines could pick them up but id be using sometimes up to a 12' long solid steel pry bar and dangling near the edge of a cliff trying to budge these things, sometimes id find a stone get in the way and had to chisel it out, like getting the plague from between teeth, one such stone had some circle shapes in it, it was a large boulder type stone so I didn't want to destroy it before telling the boss, I went to call him over and explained it.
We slowly removed the whole rock from the side of the cliffs edge and took it up to the top of the cliff and laid it there for a local museum to take a look, we knew that circles usually meant fossils of trees (edge on).
It turned out the stone was a whole section of tree, the trunk and branches and the museum person took some chunk that had been knocked off an had it opened properly and it was like a section of palm tree....this was in the upper dales...more then 1000 feet above water and was a swamp type tree from 50 millions years previous as I was told, now that section that broke off is in Bowes museum in Barnard Castle, Teasdale, one reason I hunt now cos my name is not on it, its described as 'local find'...they have the rest of the tree too but that isn't on display, just this 18" by 6 inch slice of palm tree fossil.

Finally Number Four

When I worked now cutting stone and shaping it, some of my stone is now in Raby castle (and will be there for the next thousand years hopefully), I was also working in a transfer station the boss also owned so when it was in a rush or I didn't have much on id work there.
One day the furniture from an old folks home came in, the place had been closed and boarded up for years and so they had demolished it and ordered a bunch of dumpsters to take the trash away.

I was running the transfer station by myself, using the multi digger to help sort the stuff out, wood in one section, steel in the scrap dumpster, paper in the landfill and soil through the screen for turning into topsoil and hardcore.

So they tipped the furniture out and there was metal commodes and some steel legged chairs with wooden seats so im happily smashing these things up, I love smashing things, its very relaxing...:laughing:

I had thrown the steel legs and wooden seats into their respective piles and so came the furniture which one was a desk with a locked draw...so I just took the sledgehammer and 'whack' 'opened it'.

Inside were some junky papers and a brown paper bag, which I had no idea what was in it but I had to keep doing my job and clear this stuff up quickly so put it in my pocket and carried on, the whole day was the same thing, sorting, cleaning, sorting, cleaning, pushing down the landfill dumpster with the multi digger arm to get as much as possible in there cos we paid for the dumpster, not the weight in the dumpster (sometimes they had to use another hydraulic arms to get the stuff out, it was that tightly packed...lol).

So when the day was over I went home and didn't realize till I was walking home (it was like 1 1/2 mile walk) that I had the brown paper bag in my pocket (it was a deep jacket so you could keep a 4lb hammer in it and not notice).

When I got home I poured the bag onto a paper plate and it was all the type of stuff you'd like...gold, silver and costume jewelry, the best part being that most of it wasn't costume...it was gold and silver, rings, ear rings, necklaces, a snuff box, bracelets, it was like a poor mans treasure chest.

I gave one of the rings to my daughter as it had her initial on it and I showed her the find...big mistake but what the hell, she'll end up with them all one day anyways, apart from that one ring they came with me to America and are still here, safely put away in an SDB and the best find depending on your view of the last three finds
 
I found a wallet with 15 crisp $100 bills in it.
 

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When I was just a little kid, my uncle and I went hiking in the woods on a hill behind his house. We took a break under an old tree and I was sitting there playing in the dirt (so I'm told) and uncovered a jar with a small dry rotted leather coin purse in it. Inside was four large cents, two indian heads and a couple of seated liberty dimes. I was so young that I don't remember finding it, but this is the story my family told me. Anyway, I still had the coin purse with all the coins inside up until a few years ago when I lost it during a move to our new home. :(

My other favorite non-detected find would be an indian artifact called a "chunky stone". I just spotted it in the field when hunting arrowheads one day.
 
When cycling to work about 30 years ago on a wet and windy day I found £25 blowing down the road. On the reverse journey after work, in the same area stuck on the wet tarmac was another £10.:money:
 
I found a wallet with $600.00 in it and a few years later found one with $300.00 in it then the last big find was a stolen motorcycle (streetbike) in a swampy area had to give that back after notifying the local police!!
 
A Garmin GPS still in the box and in the bag. Someone must have put it on the trunk of there car and drove off, it was sitting in the parking space next to my car. I waited around for a little while...
 
I'll find Megalodon teeth and Mammoth Ivory:lol: Found a big pile of copper and brass once that had been there a long time. Best find though was when I was out in the woods. My dad was a machinist. So I came across a car motor someone had dumped out. It was an old Dodge hemi motor. My dad gave me $400 for it. No idea how much he made off of it? Quite a bit though! Where he worked built racing engines.:lol:
 
Eyeballed a cannon ball !

I was relic hunting near an 1802 - 1803 Federal Fort which at the time was on the edge of the south west wilderness. I was about 1/2 miles from the fort and was detecting for civil war relics as the fort was used during the civil war too. i crossed a dry creek and looked up the way and lo and behold on a dry sandy spot , I spotted a four pound cannon ball !
 
On my way to MD on post while stationed overseas I found a 100 euro bill on the curb. I thought it was fake at first then stopped and pointy talky to a farmer and he said it was real and told me to go MD because it was a lucky day.
 
80 dollars in twenties on the sidewalk

a big plastic tool box filled with expensive tow straps in the desert

a dirt bike out in the desert (turned in to the police)
 
When I was in the 8th grade we lived on a large ranch, my father was the ranch manager. The owner wanted an old shed torn down behind the main house. He had tried to hire a grandson to do it but got turned down. Since I was standing there he offered me the job. I took it for the cash and he said I could keep anything I found.
I ended up taking more than a few handy items, nothing worth bragging about or remembering now, except for a few magazines. Seems the old geezer had bought and kept the first twenty or so Playboy issues. I knew right off they were worth something. I mean more than the immediate 8th grade "I got a Playboy" value. I even told my dad I had them. He agreed they probably were worth some cash but didn't know who would buy them.
I can't remember where we went, but I do remember seeing my mom coming back from the burn barrel (everybody used a 55 gallon drum to burn their trash in back then). You got it. She immediately started reading me the riot act about bringing smut into her house. I remember the argument very well. It was like the roles were reversed.
"Do you have any idea what you just cost me? That was a lot of money you just threw away!"
Every once and a while we will catch a show about Marilyn Monroe on the tube. I will look at my wife and say "My mom burned my copy of that issue. That was a lot of money she just threw away"
:tissue:
 
One time when I was about 10 years old, I was walking down the street with a couple of friends. I saw a Tylenol bottle against the curb, kept walking but then felt like I should look inside of it. So I went back, picked up and opened the Tylenol bottle, and there was a $20 bill inside!

Needless to say me and my friends went to the video game arcade and had an arcade game spree, and it was gone an hour later. :D I've never been good at managing money... :lol:
 
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