A Norwegian ULL Badge

Many kilometers were walked in the woods this week, trying my best not to walk right into one of the numerous well fed and fat spiders watching over their nets hanging in face-height between the trees. Most of the times I managed to avoid them, but there were a few instances of near panick incidents where I got myself all tangled up in their webs.

Also the blackflies caused a bit of annoyance with their biting. One of the afternoons when I returned to my car and took off my cap, my whole forehead was covered with streaks and spots of blood after their bitings. It really looked like I had been marched up the Golgata as I counted eleven bites from the buggers.

I had several days off work this week and spent the first of them around the site where I found the Close Combat Clasp last week. This time I didn`t really find anything very interesting and walked a long loop around the site to see if I could discover any new spots where soldiers had emptied their backpacks and pockets, without any success.

As my energy began to run low I came across an irrigation ditch where some junk had been tossed. There, in the wet, I found a few relics I couldn`t leave behind.

A chain for a k98 cleaning kit, a Truppenfahrrad rear rack, a dinner plate from a field kitchen, parts from an electrical forge blower, a really heavy hole puncher to be bolted on an office table, a thermos and a helmet liner. Several small tins made into buckets could indicate that POWs had been in the area as well since they often used such for their food.

A crushed coffee kettle.

The heavy duty hole punch. I will restore this one.

Perhaps a POW food bucket.

Barbed wire from the camp.

On my second trip during the week I went to check a place that had been on my mind since 2021. Then me and the GirlfriendWife had been searching, and as we had left we found a ditch where half of a Kraftstoff barrell stuck out from the ground. Naturally I believed it to be a full dumping ditch and now was the time to dig it out.

Even though the vegetation had made the place unrecognizable it didn`t take long before I stood on top of the barrell. I checked around it with the detector but there were no signals at all.

I tunelled a little to see if there were stuff under it, but also there it was empty.

Searching the rest of the area gave very little results. Lots of modern army junk, and rubbish tourists had left behind littered the site, but in a small slope were a tiny Wehrmacht dump.

It took around an hour to dig it out, and resulted in some beer bottles, several food tins, a rubber pad from a small tracked vehicle, cream tubes and a magazine from a Soviet DP27/28 machine gun.

The whole day the smell of death and decay had been in the air, and as I was about to cross the road I spotted the reason. A reindeer was rotting away five meters from the road, and had probably fed many animals and insects through the summer.

Across the road I searched along a path back towards my car when the metal detector screamed out. It was a huge signal so I dropped the backpack and cut my way through the networks of small roots. There I found a large screen belonging to a Wehrmacht field kitchen. It was a little bent and twisted, but in good enough condition to find its way to a restoration project.

The first signal this day was a tent peg made from a horseshoe.

Medical cream tube. "Lebertransalbe".

Red Army machine gun magazine.

A decaying reindeer.

This large part fits to a german field kitchen.

Pine forest spider trap. Walk with your mouth closed.

Friday was the last time this week I had a chance for some metal detecting, and I had a plan to re-check a dumping pit I dug as the dusk descended on me sometime last autumn. Moving through the forest I soon got stuck in a slope where it were lots of signals, so I never reached the dumping pit.

On the very first signal I found a great little relic. A nametag for an animal, and my bet is a horse. Stamped on it was "Mitzi" and number "16". I just love finds like that!

The next one I opened was an empty gasmask canister and after that I dug up a small pit filled with medical ampoules, bottles, cream tubes, a Norwegian porcelain plate and lots of large nails. Together with that was a nice little ashtray with "Nordkapp" and a viking ship stamped on, and an interesting small plastic tube to keep tablets in.

Just after getting back on my legs I had to bend down again to dig up a Notek lamp, and then a small but sharp signal caught my attention.

From deep in the moss I removed a small badge! From its shape I thought it was an Eismeer medallion and was overjoyed. But then I saw it was blank on the backside and didn`t have either the text or Edelweiss I expected to see.

The design showed a person on ski, and I understood it was a ULLR Badge. But it still looked different to what I expected that one to look like, so I sat down and poured some water on it to get some of the crud off it.

It was a Norwegian ULL badge. ULL/ULLR is the Norse god of Ski, and patron of the skiers. These badges were often bought and carried by Ski- and Gebirgsjägers, and I was very pleased with finding a Norwegian version of it.

On the backside was the initials of the producer "ZP" and engraved by hand was a number "30148", perhaps a fieldpost number?

I spent an hour zig-zagging the surrounding area but the luck had run out. Instead I began to notice all the blueberries around me. Lots and lots of them. I dumped the digging gear and retrieved a plastic bag from the backpack and began picking.

An hour or so later I had at least a kilo of delicious blue gold and could happily waddle back to the car.

At home we picked clean the strawberry field so that we could have a real feast a bit later in the evening.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it. I wish you a great week, and hope you do something good to someone :)

Nametag for a horse named Mitzi.

Lots of fragile medical ampoules.

Ashtray with "Nordkapp, Norge".

Container for tablets.

A nice Notek lamp.

Norwegian ULL badge.

"ULL Skiløpernes Genius" ULL Patron of Skiers.