Ashley's Roman brooch find

I chatted with Ashley D. today at their farm shop near Bisley. Ashley is one of the three sibling owners of Stancombe Beech Farm who let me sell my cards in the shop, some of which feature views around the farm.

I asked if he would be giving another talk on the finds he has made in their fields over the years. I went to one of his talks about ten years ago and was amazed at what he had to show. Today he mentioned that he had found round two lead shots which were probably seventeenth century.

He then showed me this object which a metal detectorist had found in a field just fifty yards from the shop. He had it assessed by an expert who said it was a second or third century Roman brooch, made of bronze with a broken clasp which you can see, and a spring in the main round tubular section. It was lying below the level of his plough's depth so wouldn't easily have come to the surface. I popped them onto a cardboard box and took this snap.

He often finds flints and one recent one is estimated to be a three thousand year old scraper measuring about one and a half inches in length. Unfortunately he didn't have it at the farm.

Bisley has a long archaeological history with many known Roman finds in the vicinity. The village is only about ten miles from Corinium, Roman Britain's second largest city and now called Cirencester. It lies close to the old trackway from there to Glevum, now called Gloucester, which was a Roman fort on the lowest bridging point of the River Severn at that time. It took nearly two thousand years for a bridge to be built closer to the sea, when the M4 bridge near Chepstow was constructed in the 1960s.