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.