It was once a healthy sum for someone, worth half a week’s wages and enough to feed a family for a few days.
Then it was likely lost in the place you’d want to find it least - dropped in a chamber pot and thrown out with the ‘night soil’
But now the gold half-sovereign has been found again, one of several artefacts from the past as a new archaeological dig sheds fresh light on Edinburgh’s history - from the days when farmers once tiled the soil that is now the city’s streets to the tumult of the industrial revolution.
Archaeological work has revealed the changing landscape on the edges of Auld Reekie as the landscape shifted from medieval farming to mining and eventually housing.
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Prior to the building of a new housing development at Lang Loan, on the southern outskirts Scotland’s capital, staff from Guard Archaeology undertook digging work and metal detecting which revealed more than one hundred traces of the area’s past.
The earliest features uncovered on the site relate was evidence of medieval farming, and traces of these people who worked the land were excavated from a drainage ditch running thought to be part of a system related to the later quarry.
The site mapped out Pic: Guard archaeology
This material included pottery fragments of a large cooking dish dating to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, while burnt cereal grains - mainly oats but also a small amount of barley and rye – were found. These were likely left over from malting and brewing.
As the seventeenth century dawned, the area was given over to coal mining, with the presence of small exploratory coal pits peppering the landscape uncovered during the work.
Fragments of eighteenth-century bottle glass dating to the period 1690-1710 was also uncovered, and by the early nineteenth century coal shafts had been sunk and large open-cast limestone quarries cut through the fields.
The limestone quarrying scars represent the impact of industrial activity on the landscape and likely follow the line of limestone seams which were also mined at nearby quarries and mines.
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While the main quarry scar was shown on the 1855 Ordnance Survey map, neither the smaller quarry scar nor contemporary quarry pits and shafts encountered by archaeologists are.
Amongst the bottle glass and glazed ceramic fragments dating mainly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the half-gold sovereign, minted in London in 1863, was also recovered from the site.
The date on the coin reads 1863
At 22 carat gold, the value of such a coin was significant and was a considerable loss to the owner. The coin was probably lost through the spread of human bodily waste across the fields for fertilisation at some point during the late nineteenth century.
“Within this compact area survived traces of a landscape featuring medieval rig and furrow and field boundaries, disturbed by later coal extraction and limestone quarrying,” said Natasha Ferguson, one of the co-authors of a report on the work.
She added: ‘The site offers a fascinating example of economic reformation in the modern era from medieval agriculture to the increasingly high impact industrial processes of the nineteenth century. “Here landscape transformation is visible with the first exploratory coal pits of the seventeenth century to the larger scale limestone extraction through open-cast quarrying.
“Changes in the landscape throughout the industrial reformation were significant in Scotland and this site neatly represents a dense microcosm of that transformation.”
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