Yakima County Park Hunt/ESCHBAUGH PARK
Last weekend I searched an old county park. Usually I am pretty much the only one there, but this weekend was different. There was a group from the SCA, a Middle Ages and Renaissance bunch, who would have probably liked to have been born in the 17th century. I suspect that I was probably not supposed to be there, but it was the last day of their events and I tried to stay out of the way by searching a field they were not using. I was finding the usual clad coins when one of the folks from the group approached and was curious about what I was finding. Apparently the day before they had used this field for staged battles, complete with a portable castle. Sounds like it was full on swords and arrows kind of war.True to form, he was wearing some pretty interesting jewelry, in the form of claws, birds and the like. Turns out he was a maker of jewelry that they used. Most of the things he made were using old techniques. Pierced and hammered jewelry.
After meeting him, I wondered what I might find. I did search the area where they had the battle, but it was pretty clean. I am sure they take care not to lose items during battle. That evening, when they had packed up, I returned and searched through the camp sites and places I had noted they congregated. Those areas were so full of bottle caps, pull tabs, foil ect. that I just used my pinpoint function and searched for only surface targets. By the way, all the trash was not from them. This is a busy park in the summer and my detector was showing most of the trash was at least an inch down or at least not on the surface. For as large a group that was there, the did a great job with clean up.
As you can see, I found a few hammered rings and odd pieces of jewelry. I especially like the silver frog. I also found several heavy metal tent stakes. Nice to pick those up as the county mower would have loved hitting those.The money value of the rings were just pennies, but the workmanship and old world styles were pretty nice to see.
No ring hunts this month so far, but hoping to be sharp if someone loses that special something.
Take it easy,
Steve
