Fieldwalking Finds

This autumn has seen a busy programme of fieldwalking in Upper Coquetdale, with fantastic results. Teams of volunteers have braved all weathers to carefully mark out fields into grids, and then to walk along the grids picking up tiny fragments of flint, worked stone, pottery and other materials.

One the first day of fieldwalking, at Farnham near Sharperton, we were lucky enough to find two flint arrowheads. Dr Rob Young, national park archaeologist and veteran fieldwalker, found the first, a beautiful white Bronze Age arrow, which was, incredibly, undamaged despite having laid in the ground for 4000 years!  Hot on the heels of this discovery, volunteer Elspeth Horsfield found another Bronze Age arrowhead, slightly damaged but still a very fine example.

The arrowheads found during the field walking programme

Other finds include prehistoric flint scrapers (used for cleaning animal hides), a tiny microlith blade (left behind by the earliest hunters during the Mesolithic period), and a coin from 1861. Many more finds are still awaiting sorting and classification.

All the finds from fieldwalking will be put into a database; this will help us to identify new sites and patterns of how people lived and worked in the landscape over many generations.