HISTORY hunter Mark McMullan has made two amazing, and very different, finds with his metal detector this month.

Beside a Roman road on the outskirts of Darlington, he unearthed a 2,000-year-old Roman coin which takes us back to the days of the emperor who fiddled while his city burned.

And at the site of a south Durham colliery, he found a 125-year-old medal which takes us back to the days when cricket was played on a pitheap.

Mark, of Darlington, always detects where he has permission, and nine inches down in a field near the village of Manfield, he discovered a Roman silver denarius coin that was struck in Rome around AD65.

What stories it could tell!

The Northern Echo: The rear of Mark's Roman coin shows the goddess Salus

On one side (above) is Salus, the Roman goddess of welfare, health and prosperity, and on the other is the face of the emperor and the worn words: “NERO CAESAR AVGVSTVS” (below).

The Northern Echo: Mark McMullan's silver denarius showing emperor Nero, minted about AD65 and found this month near Manfield

This is the emperor Nero, who succeeded to the throne in AD54 at the age of 16 when his mother, Agrippina, poisoned her husband, the emperor Claudius. Agrippina thought she would be able to rule through her young son, but Nero murdered her when she became too interfering. He also murdered his step-brother and probably his wife as well.

Claudius had started the Roman invasion of Britain in AD43, and in Nero’s time, a revolt by the Iceni tribe, led by Queen Boudica, had to be crushed around AD60.

The other big date in Nero’s reign was July 18 AD64 when the Great Fire of Rome started. It may have been an accident, beginning in a merchant’s wooden workshop, or it may have been arson by Nero himself who wanted to clear a space on which to build a golde on a scn palace.

The Northern Echo: Undated handout photo issued by the British Museum of a marble portrait of Nero (Type IV), part of an exhibition on Nero at the British Museum which will examine the misogynistic treatment of women in the Roman Empire. Issue date: Thursday April 22,

A bust of Nero in the British Museum

Either way, that night, as the fire took hold, Nero’s opponents alleged that he was on stage in a costume singing songs – which gave rise to the story that he played the fiddle as Rome burned, even though the fiddle had yet to be invented.

To pay to rebuild the city after the six day fire, and to construct a golden palace for himself, Nero raised taxes so high he was deposed in AD68, after which he committed suicide.

Mark’s coin comes from the last years of Nero’s reign, just after the Great Fire. But those were the early years of the Roman rule in England – they were still trying to subdue northern England where Cartimandua, the queen of the Brigantes, was establishing herself as the leader.

The Northern Echo: A sunny day in Manfield in the 1960s with the village school on the right. The village is only a couple of hundred yards from Dere Street

Manfield, with the village school on the right hand side, in the 1960s

Dere Street, which runs near Manfield on its way from York to Hadrian’s Wall via Piercebridge and Binchester, would in the AD60s just have been a track. It grew in importance once the wall had been started in AD122.

The coin, which appears to have been in circulation for many years, was found just 150 yards from Dere Street. Perhaps it was dropped by a traveller or centurion from Rome using the road, or perhaps it was dropped by an emissary on his way to talk to Cartimandua in her nearby stronghold of Stanwick St John.

If only the coin could talk…

The Northern Echo: The cricketing medal that Mark McMullan found near the Adelaide Colliery pithead to the north of Shildon

Mark’s second fascinating find came about 500 yards from the pithead of Adelaide Colliery, which was sunk between Shildon and South Church in 1830 by Pease and Partners. It is a lovely, if fragile, cricketing medallion (above), with the batsman adopting a combative Ben Stokes-style stance while wearing a flat cap on his head.

The Northern Echo: A magnificent picture from Tom Hutchinson's book showing miners playing cricket at Adelaide Colliery

This is all the more fascinating because in his 2009 book about South Church, historian Tom Hutchinson includes this brilliant picture from the 1890s showing Adelaide miners, in their cloth caps, playing cricket in the shadow of the pitwheel on a scratty wicket which looks as if it would favour the bowlers.

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