I’d rather travel back in time than make a fortune as a real-life Detectorist
The smash-hit BBC comedy celebrated the hobbyists who dig up historical treasures. But, explains this patient Scottish sleuth...
WE are standing in a secret location as detectorist Alan Baxter calmly demonstrates how to unearth buried treasure. ‘You need to slow it right down,’ he gently chides. ‘I’ve seen some guys walking so fast with the dial so high off the ground that they couldn’t pick up the signal from a radiator. And others swing it like a pendulum and cut off 20 per cent of the sweep.
‘You need to go in zombie mode. You need to go right down to the ground, especially for medieval stuff which is so thin. Like a delicate hoover – nice, steady, slow, methodical, flat to the ground so you cover the greatest surface area. You treat the land nice and it will reward you. Just slow and low, slow and low.’
Mr Baxter knows a thing or two about biding his time. He had to be patient after he unearthed a fabulous medieval ring in a field in Fife and all his senses told him there must be more ancient artefacts to uncover nearby.
Unfortunately, he found his path stymied by the stubble from the thick oat crop planted by the farmer, which made it impossible to get his metal detector anywhere near the ground.
So he waited. And waited. For years. Until the farmer planted and harvested the right crop – carrots. ‘It must have
‘There was just an explosion of amazing finds’
had a deep plough when the carrots got lifted and I could get my detector right to the soil,’ the 44-year-old lab technician recalls. ‘It was a long wait, but it was well worth it. There was just an explosion of finds. Every 3ft I was getting a signal. I couldn’t move, there was stuff everywhere. I didn’t want to go home.
‘We were getting medieval buckles, medieval strap ends, medieval fasteners, medieval coinage and it was just incredible.’ The ‘we’ in question is Mr Baxter and his father, also Alan, who introduced his son to the hobby 12 years ago and regularly accompanies him on digs.
Having arrived at the dig on a sunny day in early August 2022, they could scarcely contain their collective amazement at their growing haul.
In all, they have unearthed an assemblage of 500 items at this ‘hotspot’ ranging from the Bronze Age to the medieval period, including a Bronze Age axe head, Roman brooches and Viking dress pins.
The highlight was a hoard of farthings minted in Edinburgh around 1466 from the reign of Scottish King James III.
‘I got a small signal from my detector and unearthed a green copper alloy hammered coin. I knew it was a James III farthing as I had seen them before. I knew it was really rare because I know my coins. I started to get more small signals and shouted to my dad to come over. After that it was just like a tap, it just kept on going, and over the course of a few weeks we pulled 52 of them.’
The scene could have been written for the BBC’s cult hit Detectorists, which follows the gently meandering adventures of Lance (played by Toby Jones) and Andy (Mackenzie Crook) and their fellow members of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club as they search for their own elusive pots of gold.
As Lance and Andy might have said, good things come to those who wait.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr Baxter, from Falkirk, who has just written a book about his remarkable detecting experiences, is a huge fan of this warmly whimsical show, although it sometimes feels a little close to home.
‘My fiancée Karen would watch it too and says we are pretty much like Andy and Becky [played by Rachael Stirling],’ he says. ‘I used to go to a detectorists’ club just like Danebury and would ask if she wanted to come to the talks and she would tell me to “f*** off” just like Becky. I think we even had a talk about buttons, just like on the show.’
He says Karen, 38, a civil servant, quietly tolerates his obsession: ‘I do bang on about it quite a lot. I am on the computer researching all the time. But she encouraged me to start, so it’s partly her fault. I never realised how addictive it could be.
‘But the series is true to life, particularly the other group trying to get in on your permissions. I have had people physically following me to find out where I go detecting. You see them park their cars up and getting their binoculars out. I have had worse than that, run-ins, it can be quite extreme.’
The permission he guards most jealously is his ‘carrot field’, a 14acre site where he is convinced he has stumbled upon a significant
medieval settlement. ‘I think it was a hybrid site with a market and a traditional village and it looks like they were making stuff there as well, because there are lots of tiny wee bits of tin all over the place.’
His excitement at the sheer volume of finds stems from an awareness of the difficulties in finding material that is more than 500 years old: ‘The population of medieval Scotland was only 250,000 and numbers were ravaged by war and diseases like the plague. Also, 90 per cent of Scottish soil is so acidic that most medieval coinage cannot survive. I am so lucky that the quality of soil here has preserved so much.’
Aside from the sheer quantity of his finds, their rarity and quality appear to back up his conviction he has found something special.
Years spent poring over maps and historical documents have also led him to a stunning medieval betrothal ring and two extremely rare coins – one of which has written a new chapter in Scotland’s numismatic history.
Put like that, it’s easy to see why detectorists, once derided as the nerdiest of nerdy hobbyists, are now regarded as the new cool. Even actress Carey Mulligan is reputed to have taken up the pastime. Physically, at least, Mr Baxter doesn’t fit the old stereotype – tall and athletic, he only ever wanted to be a footballer growing up, even signing schoolboy forms with Dundee United before ultimately failing to make the grade: ‘My knees packed in. I thought metal detecting would be a nice, low-impact hobby to take up.’
It started for him in 2012, shortly before the first of his two daughters was born and his wife encouraged him to go out with his father, now 73, who had been pestering him to try it out.
‘He would go out with a club and it became more of a social thing for him,’ Mr Baxter says. ‘It wasn’t a big club and it disbanded after some of the older guys died, but he and I were starting to go off and do our own digs by then.’
Within months, Mr Baxter had made his first significant find – a silver Roman coin dating to 96AD, from the reign of Emperor Nerva.
He was immediately hooked: ‘It got me away out into the fresh air, especially when the kids were young. It resets you as you wander about looking at the views. I look forward all week to going out at the weekend. It’s always in the back of your mind and it gets you through your working week.’
But it’s the thrill of the find also. As if to prove a point he hides a tiny medieval coin in the ground for me to find with his Minelab CTX 3030 (the same model used by Lance in the TV series). When my headphones startle into life with a digital squawk, it sends a sharp tingle of excitement up my arm. The brief low tone indicates medieval material, my teacher explains. The coin is smaller than my thumbnail, paper-thin and featherlight in the hand.
It’s a penny from the reign of Edward I, who ruled England between 1272 and 1307 and whose reputation as the Hammer of the Scots was far weightier than his coinage, even though that dropped penny was likely a day’s pay for Edward’s soldier.
‘It’s worth about £10 to £20 now,’ says Mr Baxter, almost dismissively. ‘Treasure Trove wasn’t interested in claiming it because it was a single penny and there are many examples around.’ Under Scots law, anything of archaeological, historical or cultural significance found by metal detectorists can be claimed by the Crown and must be handed into the Treasure Trove for analysis and recording.
If claimed, finds are allocated to a museum and an award is paid to the detectorist, who generally splits the money with the landowner.
As his book, Making History: My Life As A Scottish Metal Detectorist, makes clear, many of Mr Baxter’s finds have piqued the authorities’ interest and have earned him thousands of pounds in return.
One of his favourites was his first find on the Fife site in April 2018, a medieval ring he initially mistook for a drinks bottle top, as he found it close to a busy road.
‘It was a bright sunny day and I just saw the shiny edges at first, then the soil fell out of the middle. When I gave it a wipe and saw the writing at the side and the big clasped hands at the front, I knew it was a medieval ring. An absolute topper. I was shaking.’
The ring is silver dipped in gold: ‘It weighs 9.5g, it’s a heavy piece. A medieval penny would weigh about 1.2g, so that’s about seven medieval pennies, so it would have been a high-status owner. A peasant couldn’t have afforded it.’
The fact it was a personal artefact made it extra special: ‘Somebody would have looked at that every day, just like we do with a watch or jewellery or wedding band today. It would have meant something to them, so it means more to me. When I took it home and cleaned it, I said to Karen, “This is going to be worth thousands”, to which she replied, “What, that bit of rubbish?”’ The ring was claimed for Kirkcaldy Galleries and went on display with Mr Baxter’s name next to it, although it is currently in storage. ‘I got £1,500 for it – I thought it was worth more,’ he admits.
Any disappointment has been tempered by other dramatic finds in the same general area, not least the discovery of two rare farthings from the brief reign of John Balliol between 1292-1296.
‘The rare Balliol farthings are about a quarter the size of the nail on your pinkie. Only two have been found in the whole of Scotland and I found both.’
He found the first in 2019. Prompted by a faint signal, he dug down 2in and a tiny grey disc popped out. His heart ‘skipped a beat’ when he realised what it was. Only one like it, from late in Balliol’s reign, had been found before, in 1997 in Suffolk.
But better was to come the following year. Just 80 yards from where he found that first coin, he dug up another: ‘The more recent one was much rarer. It was from the first part of Balliol’s reign when the coins were much rougher. That rough issue farthing is unique.’
Not only had he turned up a rare coin, it represents a new type and denomination not previously recorded. Numismatics journals had to be rewritten to accommo
‘For me, the thrill, the buzz, is in changing the history of an area’ ‘An absolute topper of a medieval ring’
date two sorts of Balliol farthings and the finds were allocated to the National Museums of Scotland. ‘I got £5,000 for that one coin alone. The other Balliol earned me £3,500, so £8,500 for two coins, but obviously half of that goes to the landowner.’
Unusually, then, it is a hobby that can make money, although rarely the fabled millions that have accompanied worldrenowned hauls, such as the recent Galloway Saxon hoard. Most of his recent hoard is yet to be assessed by Treasure Trove staff as the pandemic caused a backlog in the system.
In any case, the money is secondary to Mr Baxter: ‘For me, the thrill lies in changing the history of an area by what I find. That’s the buzz.’
In the TV series, Lance describes metal detecting as ‘the closest you’ll get to time travel’. It’s an idea that appeals to Mr Baxter: ‘If someone offered me a million pounds or the chance to go back in time and observe what life was like in medieval times, I would choose the latter every time. What did they wear, how did they live, how did they speak? How did their lives relate to my finds?
‘We wake up in our comfortable houses and have everything on tap; they didn’t know what they were doing this time next week, if they would survive the winter or plague or war. All that life went on there in that place, but for most of us it’s just a field of carrots.’
They do say carrots can improve one’s vision – they seem to have helped Alan Baxter see far into the past.