According to Guy Shrubsole (Who Owns England?) just 25,000 landowners have control of half of the country. From that Paul Barford has made a leap of logic: it would be better to spend time and money outreaching to those 25,000 landowners who would mostly listen than to detectorists, who mostly don’t!

The reality is that it’s not PAS or archaeologists who control whether detecting takes place, it’s landowners alone and if they’re properly informed via the broadsheets and farming magazines they’ll be immune from farm gate baloney.

Thirteen simple, but true words, “most detectorists don’t report most finds so are the antithesis of amateur archaeologists“, read by the right people, would do far more good than 20 years of expensive outreach to the wrong people. It would be a massive leap forward for conservation. Detectorists would at last have to prove they were “only interested in the history” not just say it!

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More Heritage Journal views on artefact collecting
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