I’ve got the booty bug – and can’t wait to get digging
Having read this week about the metal detectorist in Shropshire who uncovered a 750-year-old seal commissioned by Pope Innocent IV, I am once again seized with below-the-radar enthusiasm for this most arcane of pastimes.
I say arcane, but friends and family just think of the tenderly downbeat comedy Detectorists, with Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones, and hear “sad”, “loser” and “middle-aged”.
That’s why they all put me off last time I expressed an interest in hiring a device to boost the domestic coffers and possibly bag the coveted cover of Treasure Hunting – Britain’s best selling metal detecting magazine.
That was last August, when a couple in their early 40s (not middle-aged, actually…) had only gone and discovered 2,571 silver coins dating back to the Battle of Hastings buried in an unploughed field in Somerset.
Imagine it: after all those ring pulls, a load of 1,000-year-old King Harold II pennies from the end of Anglo-saxon England, and William the Conqueror coins commemorating the 1066 Norman conquest.
To be honest, I would be more taken with the acclaim than the guesstimated £5million pay-off. In a world where it’s hard to shine, there is no more enduring form of reflected glory.
Meanwhile in Shropshire, the new find of an old seal is the 1.5millionth object to be discovered under the British Museum’s Portable Antiquities Scheme, created in 1997, so that archaeological objects found by the public can be recorded to advance knowledge of the past.
I love stories that put places unexpectedly on the bounty map of Britain: the Staffordshire Hoard, the Frome Hoard, the Leekfrith Iron Age torcs, the Ringlemere Cup found in Sandwich. I could go on.
These evocative wonders genuinely thrill people like me who may not be great with dates and monarchs, but are excited by ancient booty and how it reveals the rich accretions of history hidden in the heart of our countryside.