Rotary club detecting rally cancelled! (Was it something we said?)

 

Like most Rotarians, members of Dunmow Rotary club seem a nice, well-meaning group of senior citizens. They’ve just cancelled their “charity metal detecting rally”, ostensibly because of coronavirus. Strange that, as all other rallies are going ahead. Is it because of what we said a couple of weeks ago:

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“Rotary Clubs are by far the biggest hosts of Charity detecting rallies. (“Rotary club” + “metal detecting” gets you 15,500 Google hits). It’s due to the kindness of their land-owning members, unaware of the heritage damage, and that the main beneficiaries are the detectorists, who keep the finds, not donate them.”

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.Let’s hope so, and that other Rotary clubs will follow suit. It’s a lesson to PAS: we know you don’t like big rallies because of the heritage damage they do, so rather than endlessly shrugging and saying “but they’re legal so we can’t do anything”just tell landowners the truth, starting with all the Rotary clubs?

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More Heritage Journal views on artefact collecting
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