IMHO: Dig everything! Start in the inside floor, walls and brick chimney. For the outside you need to grid the entire area in multiple direction. Do not forget the wooded area, under trees and roadways. This will give you something to do for awhile!
on the inside if their are linoleum floors look around the edges. People used to slip gold and silver coins there. also look at stairs and between the stair step and riser. These are two places that I have heard about inside old homes.
on the outside see if there are any fence post or post holes depressions in site of the main room's windows. Post hole banks were popular during the bank failure period of America. They would bury their money in jars in a hole near a fence post that was visible from a window of a room that was used a lot.
good luck and have fun. Great that you found her horse. Horses are very special animals.
Go through it and under it thoroughly for bottles, then worry about detecting the grounds. Just the look of those floor joists is enough to get me to crawling.
Congratulations on the awesome permission Gary! I’d start at the back door and work my way in or out.
Great way to locate the missing horses with a drone.
Nice reward for a good deed! Lots of good advice in these posts. A bottle hunter would approach this differently that a coin hunter. As a coin hunter, I like to know, or infer, the location of the outhouse and the clothesline - the the most likely route to them. Can you ask if there are any old photos of the place? Was there a root cellar? Were potatoes kept in the basement? (Some people tossed a large cent into a pile of potatoes as the copper had some fungicide properties.)
Good Morning Gare, Well in 18 days you've received some Stellar research and hunting suggestions as the Tnet 'family' have stepped up to the plate with some great inputs. However Ma Nature may have stepped in to thwart your searching of the area with either snow or solidly frozen ground, that would be a shame. But then if that is the case, it gives you months to do your paper research for compiling all the answers into a search pattern for when the spring thaw arrives.
We sure would appreciate your sharing with us once you can Do Something out on that hill, we drool over pictures! Best of success for all of your endeavors!......................63bkpkr