Where to find buried money

As participants fan out over a field in the military-style camouflage jackets and pants that many of them favor, they can look like a Great Army themselves, bearing spindly devices in place of weapons. Sometimes a find transforms a hard-up hobbyist into a wealthy man. Now known as the Staffordshire hoard, it includes gold and silver ornaments, among them decorative sword fittings.

The hoard is valued at more than five million dollars. Powell and Davies had a potential fortune on their hands, but they also had a problem. It is standard practice for detectorists to come to an agreement, preferably in writing, with a landowner whose fields they wish to scan, in order to avoid charges of trespassing or ownership disputes over finds.

Terry Herbert and Fred Johnson fell out after the discovery of the Staffordshire hoard, with Herbert accusing Johnson of wanting to keep the reward money to himself. The proceeds were split. Powell, who has a dark beard, an upturned nose, and extensive tattoos on his neck and knuckles, had obtained the permission of one resident in the Eye area, Yvonne Conod, to search a field of crops next to her farmhouse.

But Mark, a tenant farmer, could not legally authorize a search of fields that he merely rented. The Cawley family once occupied Berrington Hall , an elegant eighteenth-century mansion just east of Eye. A condition of the arrangement was that Lady Cawley, who was eighty years old when her husband died, could reside at the house for the rest of her life. No doubt to the stifled frustration of the National Trust, she lived for twenty more years, taking lunch every day in the opulent dining room, obliging restorers to stop their work while she did so.

Berrington Hall, now open to the public, sits atop a hill with views of parkland laid out by the landscape designer Capability Brown, and picturesquely grazed by sheep. Instead, they returned to South Wales, where Davies posted an image of three coins from the find on the online forum of a metal-detecting club.

Reavill tries to cultivate good relationships with detectorists, often addressing meetings of local societies. It is decorated with a nose, eyebrows, and a mustache, so that almost a millennium and a half later the glowering visage of its wearer—probably Raedwald, the King of East Anglia—outstares any viewer. But, for archeologists and historians, coins, whose detailed inscriptions allow for precise dating, and which are signed by their manufacturer, often provide more crucial insight about the shifting dynamics of power in proto-England.

On the obverse of each coin was a stylized profile of either Alfred or Ceolwulf. The discovery that Alfred and Ceolwulf minted coins in the same style offered surprising evidence of an alliance between them—one that Alfred had sought to whitewash in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Reavill obtained the e-mail addresses of Powell and Davies from a detectorist society, and wrote to them on July 6th, a month or so after their adventure. Though the Treasure Act requires detectorists to contact the authorities within two weeks, it allows for a delay should the finder not recognize the value of an artifact or claim not to. Administrators are sympathetic with detectorists who are reluctant to surrender exciting discoveries, sometimes for reasons more emotional than monetary.

Historically, even in cases where a finder mistakenly strayed onto territory where he lacked permission to search, the Treasure Valuation Committee, which decides the apportionment of a reward, has been forgiving, with the finder dividing the prize equally with the landowner. In fact, the coins were already being quietly sold off. Two days after making the find, Powell and Davies met with an acquaintance named Paul Wells, a retired builder from Cardiff who traded coins.

Powell and Davies took about a dozen coins from their pockets and explained that they had found perhaps two or three hundred more—though it was hard to tell how many, because they remained clumped together in the exhumed earth.

Wells was astonished by the coins. Sallam, who owns Antiques at the Green, a shop in the harborside Welsh town of Tenby, told the detectorists that they had to report their find to the authorities, but he agreed to take the items to be seen by a more knowledgeable numismatic colleague, Lloyd Bennett. Bennett, pointing out the pair of kings depicted on the coins, identified them as dating from the late ninth century, and said that they were in very good condition.

It needs to be declared. Wicks has a blighted reputation, having been convicted in of nighthawking. He could be buying coins today, motorbikes tomorrow, and old military-cap badges the next day. To have seven offered at one time is really unusual. Hoard coins often bear a half-moon imprint indicating where one coin has overlain another. Those in the middle of a cache can be in almost pristine condition, having been protected from soil exposure by surrounding coins.

Brown told Wicks that he could not give a valuation on the spot, and he retained the objects in a safe on the Dix Noonan Webb premises. Later, Brown estimated that the consignment of seven coins was worth nearly four hundred thousand dollars. Usually, Davies was chatty, but Lodwick noted that on this occasion he seemed anxious. Powell did most of the talking, and at one point produced a plastic takeout container. Inside, wrapped in paper towels, were the three items of gold jewelry: the bangle and the faceted ring, both later confirmed to be from the ninth century, and the crystal orb, which is from the fifth or sixth century.

Lodwick printed a map of the area where Powell said that the items had been found, and the detectorists marked several spots on it, claiming that the jewelry had been buried under a tree. When Lodwick later checked the area on Google Earth, there were no trees to be seen.

At the end of the meeting, Powell and Davies showed Lodwick two silver Saxon coins, of a style known to collectors as cross and lozenge. The pair was worth perhaps forty thousand dollars. Although the surface tint of the coins suggested to Lodwick that they had been buried together, the detectorists insisted that they had found one coin each, in separate fields, thereby obviating any need to declare them as treasure.

The next day, Powell returned to the Leominster area and visited the home of Mark Conod, the tenant farmer, excitedly recounting to him and his wife, Amanda, that on a recent scan of their property he had found some jewelry, which was now at a museum. That July, Reavill alerted the West Mercia Police to the possibility of a heritage crime, and, because of the potential multimillion-dollar value of the alleged find, an investigation was launched.

Around this time, Simon Wicks, the coin dealer, returned to Dix Noonan Webb with nine equally remarkable coins, which the auction house also took into its custodianship. All the coins were soon turned over to the police. The next month, the British Numismatic Trade Association issued an unusual warning to its members, stating that coins believed to be from an undeclared hoard were sneaking onto the market, and that buying any of them would violate the Treasure Act.

On August 18, , a little more than two months after their trip to Leominster, Powell and Davies were arrested. Nor is there any shortage of collectors who, in their eagerness to create a set of coins, may be willing to overlook a sketchy provenance or two.

Coins are simple to move around, including overseas, and the fact that the Treasure Act permits the retention of single-coin finds means that a cunning detectorist, over a period of time, might sell a number of valuable coins one by one, without drawing undue attention.

But such an approach is not foolproof. In , a detectorist from Norfolk, David Cockle, was sentenced to a sixteen-month prison term for theft, after selling off a hoard of ten extremely rare Anglo-Saxon gold coins, having previously declared them as individual finds from various sites around the U. Cockle happened to be a police officer, a circumstance that likely added to the vigor with which his case was pursued.

Prosecutions of rogue detectorists are uncommon, as criminal-investigation departments contending with cases of rape, murder, and armed robbery are disinclined to dedicate their limited resources to the disappearance of objects whose original owner might have been dead for more than a millennium. Powell told the police that he was a longtime hobbyist, having started metal detecting with his father. Powell denied all knowledge of a hoard of coins. The homes of Powell and Davies were searched.

This is why it's common to bury things near easily-remembered "markers. There are many things which could be markers. Start with those before searching an open area where a burial spot could be easily forgotten. Lumps or dips in the surface of a yard can indicate where something was buried. After a hole is filled and leveled off, the soil often settles a bit. A mound may be there if all the soil didn't fit back in the hole. One thing you should know about this though, is that you might unearth a dead cat or dog by digging under the bumps and dips , so use the metal detector before digging up that buried treasure.

Locations For Buried Treasure It was common in the past, and probably still is common, to bury money and valuables under the edge of driveways, sidewalks and other cement or asphalt slabs.

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Something to do while waiting for the light to change! Lost and forgotten picnic grounds. The local historical society or library might be able to direct you to old picnic grounds, too…or they might have old photos, letters, journals or local histories that provide clues that you can use to find these places. Old picnic sites are wonderful places to search because people sat on the ground and engaged in sporting activities there, both of which often cause small valuables to fall out of pockets and get lost in the soil.

Use a metal detector to search near trees or large rocks. Also: In rural areas, ask old-timers if they recall any off-the-beaten-track spots where local residents drank during prohibition. Old speakeasys can be rich sites. People are particularly likely to drop things when they drink. Old public parks. Parks that have been in use for decades can be wonderful search sites for the same reasons as picnic grounds.

Most parks already have been picked over by other treasure hunters, however, so concentrate your search on sections of parks that other treasure hunters often overlook. These include overgrown areas, which might not have been overgrown in past decades…and the trails into and out of the parks, which tend to be ignored by treasure hunters hurrying to get to the main park grounds.

Example: I found a box of scattered Sharps buffalo gun bullets dating to the s along a path leading into a park in Queens, New York. In and under old stone walls. People sometimes stash things in stone walls and then never return to retrieve them. Example: I have found antique silverware.

People also find guns hidden in stone walls. Vacant lots where buildings stood in the distant past. To find these, visit local libraries and historical societies and ask if they have old maps of your area that show building locations. Compare these to present-day maps of the area, such as the satellite maps available on Google Maps Maps.