In September there’s to be a Metal Detecting Fun Weekender– £50 a head, 300 detectorists, which adds up to £15,000! Plus there’ll be rent/takings from a variety of trade stands and a licensed bar suggesting a total of about £20,000. Nothing unusual, the farmer will presumably get a few thousand, plus (if you believe in fairies) half the value of all finds over £500. So quite an income for simply saying yes!
But even more so when you read this from the organiser: “This land is on the Higher Level Stewardship scheme, which means for us, it is strictly forbidden to detect on grass margins around the fields, or on the camp-site pasture.”
So welcome to bonkers Britain where a farmer is getting paid by English Nature to look after the grass margins and by a bunch of detectorists to damage the rest!
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More Heritage Journal views on artefact collecting
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3 comments
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23/05/2019 at 08:52
Andy Heaton
Bonkers Britain indeed !
Take a look at this link, which has the title – “Mystery of Shropshire Iron Age coin hoard detectorists” :
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-shropshire-48366616
Take a look at the ‘facts’ – of which there are few !
Two detectorists ‘Andrew’ & ‘Charlie’ and ‘possibly from Kent’, dug up a number of coins and kindly gave them to the farmer. Realistically, they could be called anything and they could be from anywhere; oh yes, the mobile phone number that they gave to the farmer doesn’t exist.
Take note, that they ‘gave’ the coins (that they didn’t own in the first place) to the farmer – was that all the coins, or just a few ? we shall never know.
The article states that the pair visited the site ‘numerous times’ and that ‘the 15 coins alone represented the largest Iron Age discovery in Shropshire, making it a “rare and exciting” find’.
A problem that arises in situations such as this, is that find locations have to be kept secret, to prevent more detectorists from looking for more loot in the same area – so how can we piece together what happened in the past, if historical information has to be kept quiet ?
24/05/2019 at 11:27
heritageaction
Many thanks Andy. We’d like to highlight this in an article, with quotes from yourself if that’s OK.
24/05/2019 at 11:34
Andy Heaton
Yes, that’s fine !