Having arrived at our lovely destination of Bellavita the night before, I awoke at 7a.m- nice and early to get a start on some gold detecting before the kids got up!

I headed out to some promising areas on the property that I had noticed seemed to be deposits of rocks (plenty of quartz) probably put there by the old timers.  The deposits were sitting under a couple of trees and I was hoping to find some gold that perhaps they had left behind.

Bellavita made no secret of the fact it is located on a prior gold mining patch, with numerous mineshafts reported to be on the actual property itself.  I did not see these but the rock "dumps" looked pretty promising.

No luck in the rock dumps.  A few hot rocks and that's about it.  Plenty of metal in the surrounding paddock though.  The signal below looked very promising - 41 on the target ID which I am told is quite often gold on the Fisher Gold Bug Pro.  However the Iron Oxidisation scale on the left is peaking - I have since found out that this is not a good indicator of gold and that gold is normally very low on this scale.

Dug the target and it turned out to be a heavy bolt or something.  Lots of agriculture parts on this property.  Some interesting old nails that definitely look vintage.

That evening we went for a look along the fence line and dug up heaps of trash as expected. However the find of the day undoubtedly went to Tom who with his Whites found a lovely lock cover with the word "Patent" and initials "VR" on it.  This stands for Victoria Regina which is Latin for Queen Victoria. She reigned from 1837 to 1901 - which gives you an idea of how old the item is.

Here is a similar marking I found on google - for a blurry pic of what Tom found have a look at the combined treasures picture from the 28th April post.