The competitive world of metal detecting

Some detectorists will tell you that the holy grail of metal detecting is a hoard of Roman coins or Anglo-Saxon jewellery. Others will point out – borrowing a line from the TV series Detectorists – that actually the holy grail of metal detecting is the Holy Grail. Since I took up metal detecting, last summer, I have tried to set myself more modest goals.

They can be summed up in some wise words spoken to me in a field in Wiltshire after I’d suffered a near-barren day (my only finds having been a musket ball and ‘canslaw’ – a shredded drinks can). ‘A find is a bonus, a good find is a good bonus,’ said my fellow detectorist with a consoling hand on my shoulder.

My companion could afford to be sanguine – he was none other than the great Dave Crisp, finder of the Frome Hoard of Roman coins (52,503 of them) in 2010 and a poster boy for metal detecting due to the exemplary way in which he alerted the archaeological authorities once he’d unearthed the hoard.

The day I went out with Dave on the North Wessex Downs he bagged another half-dozen ‘Romans’, scattered across a field where he reckoned there had been a camp. It was his ‘permission’ – land on which the owner permits you to detect – and he had taken me there to enable me to find my first Roman coin, a rite of passage for detectorists. In other words he had led the horse to water. But the horse was unable to drink – and now stood there long-faced; a parched, useless Dobbin.

This sense of failure – and envy of other detectorists’ success – had become familiar to me in my fledgling detecting career. I had tried to fight it, I really had. But it would just pop up – most shamefully a few months earlier in a freshly cut field in Oxfordshire.

Muffled up despite the humidity, a man was detecting near me when he shouted out ‘Hammered!’ and performed a brief jig in the stubble, a mini-version of the ‘gold dance’ that detectorists are supposed to do when they find the ultimate precious metal. Finding a ‘hammered’ coin – handmade, usually medieval – is another yardstick by which detectorists measure themselves and needless to say I was yet to find one. So when I witnessed this performance I felt sick to the stomach.

My mood darkened further when the detectorist walked over and insisted on sharing the moment with me. Then he explained why it meant so much – he had spent the previous few months undergoing treatment for cancer. This was the first time in a long time he had been outdoors and it had paid off with a lovely little find. Life was not, after all, unrelenting misery.

Though he didn’t know it, he showed me how to become a better person – as, unwittingly, did other detectorists. People like wise old Dave Crisp and a blind chap called Dean, who lost his sight in adulthood but still has a detailed map of his bit of Romney Marsh in his head.

I do find stuff. I’m not a complete waste of space as a detectorist. But I have come to realise that metal detecting is not really about finding hoards or hammereds. At the risk of sounding cheesy, it’s about digging out and prizing the best bits of yourself. Mind you, I’ve practised the gold dance just in case.

Nigel Richardson’s new book The Accidental Detectorist: Uncovering an Underground Obsession is out now.