Rare finds

Anyone who has spent part of their working life digging or renovating old buildings will be familiar with an idle daydream. It’s a kind of ‘what if’ thought similar to those hopeful moments before checking your lottery ticket.

As the spade turns in the soil or the rotten floorboard creaks under the crowbar there is hope. Hope that a glint of gold or some ancient relic is waiting for the calloused hand of the labourer.

Speaking personally that hope has never been realised, a few broken bottles and empty snail shells represent my archeological zenith. My treasure chest is bare.

Jaz, a young and skilled flint waller was luckier, during the demolition of the gable end of a flint barn on a Sussex farm he found a neolithic flint hand axe. It has been authenticated and dates back to around 4000 BC a time when the entire population were ‘flint workers’ Appropriate perhaps that a member of the flint wall company found this relic of a time in which flint was king.