Detecting A Passion

[Kev]

From The Express....................................................

DETECTING A PASSION FOR LOST TREASURE 




Wednesday April 20,2011
By Sadie Nicholas  Have your say(0)
LAST week it was revealed that a metal detector enthusiast from Leicestershire struck gold when a rare medieval ring he unearthed fetched a staggering £42,000 at auction.

So is this Easter weekend the time when you get out in the fields and strike gold? Kevin Blackburn, 55, runs an online business selling metal detectors and equipment. He says: My most incredible find came one warm June day in 2003 when three friends and I uncovered the Staffordshire Moorlands patera – a bronze bowl dating back to Roman times. It was subsequently bought by the British Museum for £100,000, half of which went to the landowner while I split the other half with my three friends. The farmer was ecstatic but for me it was the history, not the money, that was the thrill.

I remember when I was a child I’d dig up the garden at home and find bits of pottery scattered around. Then in 1979 I bought a really good metal detector for £100 – a lot of money then – and found absolutely nothing with it. I decided that motorbikes and girls were more interesting and it was only in 1990 when I thought I’d give it another go. After 20 years of doing this I get a bit blasé sometimes but now and again we find things that surprise even us, like the patera.

Another proud moment was finding a Bronze Age axe head from 900BC last year. I had to report it because of its age – detectors have to declare certain items such as coins, gold or silver trinkets, of more than 300-years-old – and off it went to the British Museum to be assessed and came back to me six months later with a report. Over the years we’ve found some bizarre things such as a complete bathroom set including a cast iron bath. We also found a motorbike buried in a field and today I met a guy who found a church bell dated 1870 and weighing 200 kilograms. It
took four people to get it out of the ground.

Alastair Hacket, 61, is a retired local government officer and lives in Edinburgh. He says: People have this idea that metal detecting is a route to buried treasure and riches. Most of the time it isn’t. I’m secretary of the Scottish Detector Club and we go detecting on Sundays when land is available. Springtime is tricky as the fields are full of lambs and crops. August or September are best when the fields have been harvested. Arable land is ideal because it’s turned over at least once a year by a plough so new items will always come closer to the surface.

 

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We even offer a search and recovery service for people who’ve lost tools, car keys and jewellery. Many ladies lose rings during wintry weather when they’re out throwing snowballs, their fingers have shrunk because of the cold and the ring flies off. Provided they’ve got a pretty good idea of where they were standing when they lost the item, we’ve got a very high success rate. There are also women who contact the club having thrown a wedding or engagement ring away in the heat of a domestic dispute.

Pete Welch, 53, lives in Hampshire and is a full time event organiser for his metal detecting club – the largest in the UK – Weekend Wanderers. He says: During the long, hot summer of 1976 when I was 18 and still living at my parents’ farm in Ascot, a large parch mark showed on one of the fields. There’d been rumours of a Roman road running through our farmland so I bought a detector and sure enough that’s exactly what the parch mark turned out to cover. It was there that I found my first Roman coin, a sestertius of Faustina. For the rest of that summer I was hooked.

I discovered that many detectorists experienced difficulty gaining permission to detect on farm land and that land owners were happier to grant permission to professional, well run organisations. So I formed Weekend Wanderers. In the 20 years since we’ve had over 3000 members of all ages and walks of life. The biggest buzz is helping to write new pages in the history books and our most spectacular find was in 2009 when one of the club’s member, Chris Bayston, discovered a Saxon copper brooch covered in gold and studded with garnets and coral, plus a skull, which led us to a 1,500 year-old grave hidden beneath a farmer’s fields just outside Wantage,

the birthplace of Alfred the Great. The Home Office ordered the exhumation of the skeleton to allow archaeologists to investigate the size of the burial site. Finds like that don’t come along very often. It was a dream come true to uncover something of such national significance.

[Dodger]

Mmmm..decided that motorbikes and girls were more interesting......never had a motorbike....

[nfl]

motorbikes and women are more expensive than tectin

[tyna]

and more fun......
 

[tyna]

That's detecting I mean 

[davtec (dave)]

true true very true

[nfl]

i would say motrbikes and women are more fun

[tyna]

you're in the wrong forum then buddy 

[nfl]

no ,ive been tectin now 3 years,70+hammies,10 roman silver,2 treasure cases,loads of milled,gold for every year tectin,just feel that its hard work,and its only going to get worse....so now i enjoy tectin but also have other things on the go.tectin is not the b all and end all,but it helps to pass the time .