We live in the central west of NSW, about 25km from the nearest small town, so we do a fair bit of driving around as part of our ordinary day to day lives. If you live in a large city, whatever you need is usually just down the street. Out here it might mean a 200km round trip to get it. The end result of all this backwards and forwards travel is that we go through any number of small country villages. We learned years ago that the local Vinny's or Salvo's-type shops in these places will often provide excellent metal-detecting information in the form of local history. We often pop in and browse through the little book sections and during the past summer we picked up a small book which talked about a local area that used to have pubs, houses, schools and shops, most of which have long since disappeared. Nowadays a quiet secondary road goes through the location and a couple of houses on acreage set back from the road are all that remain of what was once a small but thriving community.
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