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.
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