Battle of Philiphaugh Community Project: Saturday

Hello all,

Well, three days of survey! Time is flying by. Today we finished Field A (opposite the Waterwheel Cafe) with two long 25m wide transects across the field and a small area of more intensive survey further up the field and along the road side where some musket balls had been previously found some years back. We covered quite a substantial area today, helped by the fact that it stayed dry and warm. My face certainly looks like it has had the sun! We had 10 metal detectorists today and a number of volunteers helping to record and lay out tapes and ropes.

Results were much better today. Came away feeling a little more optimistic than I was yesterday. The area we surveyed by the road side worked well. We came across a small concentration of artefacts including 3 musket balls, two pistol balls, a ball button and the rim of a bronze cooking pot. Interestingly, we also found three folded lead strips. This is something we quite often find on battlefield sites and may represent rations of lead which are melted down by soldiers to cast musket balls etc. The lead can be stripped from churches or from windows. As quite a heavy item this may be one of the first thing to be dropped or thrown away if being persued by the enemy! This assemblage was quite small but spatially quite distinct. So far this represents the only concentration of what I would identify as a battlefield assemblage.

Managed to finish this field which is a bit of a relief, although we were all starting to get a bit tired towards the end! I feel we have assessed this area as much as we can for now. The transects provided an interesting window into this area and although we didn't find very much, this is as much of a valid a result as if we had found hundreds of projectiles etc. Move on to the next!

Tomorrow we will be moving northeast up the Etterick valley towards Selkirk and closer to where the main engagement is believed to have taken place. Because of crops and Scheduled areas we are limited to how much ground we can cover. We will, however, be able to investigate the fringes of the fields to see if anything comes up.