My actual, very first metal detecting find was probably a rusty nail or a piece of tangled wire found in my Father-in-law’s back paddock, and my first true “keeper”—the item that sealed my obsession with the hobby—was found there as well, situated on Chapel Hill in West Grimstead.
I had barely put coil to soil just past his sheds (yes plural!) when I got a strong signal that even my ‘starter’ detector couldn’t help but find. No grunting about iron or chattering over long forgotten bonfires, it was steady, loud and repeatable. Definitely something you should dig up!
I cut a door in the turf like some sort of trapdoor spider and dug around with my trowel. I would soon learn the value of a good pin-pointer but these were early days. I soon located the dull grey curved metal of a bell. Or more accurately, a quarter of a bell. My initial guess was that it had been hit by an industrial mower or a backhoe when the land was being cleared or parcelled out. Perhaps there had been a landfill there back in the day. (It was my first week as a detectorist so of course I was qualified to make such assumptions!) Still it was a totally unexpected find and I started to ask myself how I could track down exactly where this small bell might have come from and where was the rest of it?. It was too small to be from a church belfry. More likely, it was a hand bell used by a schoolteacher in a small, local classroom. I later learned that West Grimstead National School had been very close by, and that it closed in 1922, so it was possible that my find had roughly a 100 years to its credit.
Where I found it on Chapel Hill would have been less than two minutes walk from where the school once stood and indeed there is a cottage on nearby Grimstead Road still named ‘School House.’ This little bell must have had quite the journey from it’s daily use to being discarded to turning up again in a paddock a century later. I took it inside, soil and grit still clinging to it and asked my In-laws what they thought about it? That triggered a discussion of where the school once stood and the adjacent village hall, and who would be the best person in the village to ask for more info? From that moment I was hooked and went right back out to search for the rest of it or for something even more interesting.
Even though it’s just a fragment of the original and to be honest I’m not 100% certain it actually was a school bell, it remains my favourite kind of find. It tells a story of human activity—of a parcel of land changing ownership and use, of children (or servants?) being called to attend, and of the changing times that led to my finding it a hundred yards and a hundred years away.
It was my first keeper, the first piece of buried history that truly connected me to the ground, and to the village itself, and though I never did find the rest of it, it remains a constant reminder that sometimes, the most exciting finds are not the most valuable ones, but the ones that inspire the deepest sense of curiosity.
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