It’s time to stop sneering at metal detectorists

As a teenager growing up in Cheshire I had a metal detector. Although I was slightly ashamed of it, I found all sorts of intriguing things: shrapnel, a French coin, a Khartoum Racing Club key ring, an adze and a silver brooch in the shape of a lobster. All went well until I found a second world war bomb in Tatton Park. They had to call out the army, and I got a Grade A bollocking. People hated metal detectors.

Since then I haven’t given them much thought; but Nigel Richardson has. An acclaimed travel writer, he was grounded by the Covid pandemic and, like many of us, began to reflect on the course life had taken. It worried him that he was rootless: the northern kid who went to boarding school in Sussex, the ‘citizen of nowhere’, without tribe or peers. For no particular reason he took up metal detecting. The Accidental Detectorist is the story of how he found himself again, along with a few bits of treasure.

It’s a bucolic tale of magnificent pre-historic landscapes and marginal people. Rendered in simple, fresh prose, here are some of the finest downs and uplands in the country, such as Beachy Head ‘where England ends in a toothpaste smile of despair’; even Portsmouth harbour is deftly described, with its muddy creeks, convict graves and warships looking ‘a camp shade of teal in the afternoon sun’.

But it’s the other detectorists who really bring this tale to life. They’re a motley, amiable, anti-authoritarian lot: old soldiers, hayseeds, a few women (such as ‘Digger Dawn’) and one man who’s ‘a bit Swampy the eco-warrior and a bit nutzo surrealist’. Together they turn up in ‘camos, tats, buzz cuts and tool bags’, but always with hearts of gold and pockets full of rust. Had Laurie Lee been alive, he’d have been out among them, listening to the earth and sleeping rough.

Class is a recurring theme. Detectorists know they’re sneered at and Richardson never quite shrugs off the shame. The academic establishment accuses them of theft, plunder, ignorance and salting away the nation’s heritage. Archaeologists are everything they’re not: educated, entitled, and left-wing. In fairness, they and the detectorists see the world from opposite angles. As one wag put it, it’s like the disparity between fishermen and marine biologists; they both like fish, but for different reasons.

Richardson defends his new friends against the continual jibes. True, there has been plunder. Everyone remembers the Herefordshire Hoard, where Viking artefacts worth perhaps £12 million were disposed of or destroyed in 2015. But most detectorists are only too happy to report their finds, even when they don’t have to. In the past 15 years, more than 1.5 million items have been logged under a voluntary scheme. These days, about 90 per cent of significant finds are unearthed by amateurs.

Nor is this Wurzel army necessarily ignorant. Self-taught and intuitive, its members have their own clubs, websites, magazines and jargon (‘nighthawks’, ‘grots’ and ‘Lizzies’– i.e. thieves, junk and Elizabethan coins). They also know the best places to seek out treasure. East Anglia is easily the most productive. This, says Richardson, is probably because mankind has been there for more than 950,000 years, leaving Norfolk with the world’s oldest footprints outside Africa. Scotland also yields great hoards of Roman coins, because it was money for ‘protection’ to keep the Picts at bay.

Like me, most detectorists find little of any value. But it’s still thrilling to hold something that’s lain untouched for perhaps hundreds of years, and Richardson becomes the historian of everything he finds – such as the coin made for a penal colony and his hammered Lizzie. And just occasionally the finds are stupendous. The Cunetio Hoard, unearthed near Marlborough in 1978, comprised nearly 55,000 coins. Even the centrepiece of the British Museum’s recent Stonehenge exhibition, the Nebra Sky Disc, was found by detectorists.

Remarkably, some 50 Roman hoards are registered every year. How could anyone lose a giant pot of sesterces and denarii? It makes you wonder how careless (or violent) Provincia Britannia was. As Richardson puts it, every hoard is, or was, a tragedy; but without detectorists, most of these dramas, whether small or large, would go undiscovered, perhaps forever.

There is much to think about here. Should all ancient finds belong to the state, as in New Zealand? And are detectorists to be regarded as merely looters, as they are in parts of Europe? Or can the public be trusted as participants in the hunt for our past? At a personal level too there are lessons to be learnt. Richardson writes beautifully about his return to the land, about listening to the soil and about understanding the ancient world, which, lest we forget, forms part of our everyday lives.