Last weekend, I had the opportunity to accompany a friend to an archaeological survey on Ballygawley Lough in Co. Sligo. He’s a metal detectorists who detects on archaeological sites - with a license. Metal detecting is highly restricted in Ireland. There were three divers - one of them had worked on Banshees of Inisheer and Vikings! (At least two of them do diving for movies regularly.) One of the divers doubled as metal detectorist as well, but he also had a sonar device on his canoe. When I had a peak at the screen, I discovered that it was using OpenStreetMap! With attribution! It’s the Lowrance Elite ti2, if anyone is interested. I can’t find any mention of OSM on their website.

There are two crannógs on the lake which was part of why I went with them. I had never seen one in real life, mapped a lot and discovered a few, but never actually seen one. I was offered the spare canoe, but I chickened out when it came to actually paddling over there.

The lake is very shallow; they could stand in the middle of it, but about a meter of silt, so finding anything was very difficult.

I was sometimes assisting them with little things, for example they found a pistol in the lake and asked me to google it. Turned out it was just a starting pistol firing blanks.

I got to do some metal detecting as well, but all we found was litter: bottle caps, can openers, cans. Very disappointing and disgusting that people discard of these things in the lake.

When it got a bit boring, I ventured into the nearby forest, where I had mapped a stone row the week before in preparation. I got to correct the location somewhat and added photographs to Wikimedia for it.

All in all, it was very interesting and worthwhile going.