My 11 year old son has got into metal detecting. Inspired by YouTube and the comedy show Detectorists, we got a cheap detector off Facebook Marketplace. Armed with the appropriate licenses and permissions, we go out to our local common to see what we can find.
He wants to find old coins but we usually turn up things like nails and bottle tops. Occasionally we find something more interesting. Last week we found this chunk of iron. It’s about 5 centimetres square, with a cylindrical section on top.
We couldn’t work out what it was. Any guesses?
I therefore asked Twitter. For years, Twitter was a fantastic resource for historians, since you could post a question and get lots of really useful suggestions from other users. Since it became “X”, it has become a lot less useful, and I don’t get much engagement on there nowadays. The reasons for this are well documented so I won’t go into that here.
This post seemed to spark people’s imaginations, though, and I got several suggestions. Was it part of a hinge, a railway spike, or just a piece of bog iron (a common false positive for detectorists)? Was it a miniature sofa? But a couple of tweeters cracked it:
The object was a ‘hitch’ for a side rail on a nineteenth-century bedstead. The rail hooks onto the cylindrical section to hold it in place - there are details about how this works on this website. Apparently they can be stiff and prone to breakage, which is possibly why this one was discarded.
Quite what a piece of bedstead was doing on a rural common that was used for agriculture is anyone’s guess. I doubt it is worth very much, and we will keep searching for that Saxon hoard. But it is an interesting piece of material culture, and also proves that social media can still be useful tool for research.
Matthew McCormack
HISTORY AT NORTHAMPTON 