Heer Buckles & Finnish Winter War Medal
- Inka
- 60 minutes ago
- 3 min read
This week it was finally time for a dig together with Baard again, although the weather tried its best to sabotage our search for treasures by pouring water from the skies, but on Thursday it took a break so we hurried out to the woods.
Last summer we had localized a slope full of garbage. An old landfill with German stuff from the large camp on the bottom and gradually more modern stuff up until the early nineties had been dumped on the top. A slope one can read like a history book.
It was our plan to open up a section of this slope, but as we were walking around with the detectors warming up on some single signals Baard discovered a large burn site full of relics just below the vegetation. All we had to do was to cut around the edges of the spot and roll away the grass and then scrape away sooted soil to reveal all sorts of items.
Walking over to help on the burn site I dug up a Norwegian 7.5 cm shell casing made from brass. It had been cut down to its base and then someone had used it as a target and shot three-four holes in it.
For sure a whole stack of uniforms, or perhaps a tailors crate had been torched on the site, coz Baard dug out hundreds of buttons, small clasps and hooks and several bits of cloth. Also in the same corner of the fireplace were a ton of small buckles from leather straps.
It quickly became clear that he had selected the best place to pick relics, coz ever so often he burst out in joy over a find and held up a Heer belt buckle, which in the end he found three complete ones of and a melted one, and two porcelain plate 3D puzzles with nice Heer markings.
He also found a melted blob which clearly had been a medal or badge of some kind, and a just slightly damaged quite interesting Finnish medal from the Winter War!
Where I was digging there were mostly trash, but I managed to lure out from the ground a vehicle license plate and two officers whistles, one of which in a design I hadn`t encountered before, kinda small and flat. I also found a Chevrolet hub cap, a rubber track pad and bits of a book and a signal flare shotglass.
The weather had been on our side all day long and we hadn`t even been harassed by insects, but as we closed the digsite and began to tidy up wind and rain arrived.
Later when I was home I cleaned up the license plate, but sadly time had done its thing and only some of the white paint was still intact, no numbers or letters visible any longer.
The coming week looks like it is going to be a bit drier so hopefully we are going to check out a camp we have been speculating about for a few years, which Baard secured us a permission on just a few days ago. Exciting times :)
Thanks for reading, and enjoy your week :)
