THE TREASURE HUNTERS

The contribution made to the preservation of Britain’s heritage by ‘detectorists’ - amateur archaeologists who walk fields with metal detectors

1. On a raw November morning, Cliff Bradshaw was working a potato field in Kent with his metal detector when he heard a faint, high- pitched whine through his earphones. ‘It was the tiniest possible signal,’ he says. ‘I knew it couldn’t be iron because the machine would have made a growling noise. I scuffed the ground with my foot and tried again. The sound became more and more high-pitched as I dug down until it was shrieking in my earphones.’

2. Three weeks earlier he had found a rare seventh century gold coin on the same site, then four spindle whorls, followed by a silver strap-end from a Saxon belt and a gilded Saxon button- brooch. Yet he felt this was going to be different. More than a foot below the surface, he saw the gleam of what could only be gold. Buried silver goes grey, bronze goes green and iron turns rusty, but gold comes out of the ground as brilliant as the day it went in. As a symbol of permanence, there’s nothing like it. That is its magic - for the metalworker, for the collector, for kings, for lovers, for treasure-hunters.

3. Bradshaw threw his excavating spade to one side and scraped with his hands until he had exposed the whole object. It was a corrugated cup made of sheet gold, savagely crushed on one side where it had been struck by a subsoiling machine, but still beautiful. There were tiny dots all around the rim and it had a broad, decorated handle secured with lozenge-shaped washers. Because of its round base, in its crumpled state it looked like a misshapen heart.

4. ‘I knew it was gold. I knew it was old. But there was no real jump for joy,’ says Bradshaw. ‘I never sell my stuff and I honestly didn’t think about the money. I was just shocked. The real excitement for me was finding the prehistoric barrow where I was detecting - just a foot or so of raised earth that was once as high os a I house. It was difficult to see. No one had noticed it before.’

5. As he drove home with the cup, Bradshaw had a feeling that he had seen an object like it in one of his archaeological books. He found what he was looking for; his cup was so similar to the gold Rillington Cup, found in Cornwall in 1837 by a tin worker that it might almost have been made by the same man. ‘Bronze Age. Wow! It was like the find of three lifetimes. What I felt was wonderment more than excitement.’

6. He reported his find to an archaeologist, Keith Parfitt, who had good relations with local metal detectorists. Bradshaw’s discovery is now famed as the Ringlemere Cup, only the second example in Britain of an Early Bronze Age gold cup. It dates from between 1700 and 1500 BC. Because the cup was more than 300 years old and made of more than 10% gold, it qualified as treasure under the 1996 Treasure Act, and a reward of £270,000 reflecting its value was divided equally     between Bradshaw and the farmer whose land he had been exploring. Professional excavations, with Bradshaw as part of the team, will continue on the site for many years, yielding up more artefacts; more information about society in prehistoric Britain. ‘It’s being called a ritual landscape,’ he says. ‘The floor our ancestors walked on. You can’t put a value on that, can you?’

7. This is how archaeologists and museum curators would like every story of amateur treasure finds I to end. But they don’t. An astonishing 90 per cent of all ‘treasure’ in Britain is uncovered by | ‘detectorists’, as they like to be known, sweeping the fields and hedgerows with metal detectors. The hobby took off in the 1970s and is now practised by some 30,000 enthusiasts, often in wretched wintry conditions when agricultural land is /allow. Most of them do it because, like Bradshaw, they love the sense 0/ ‘being in touch with the past’ and have become knowledgeable spare-time archaeologists in their own right. But a few are blatantly in it/or the money and some sites have been wrecked beyond recovery by their depredations. Without an accurate ‘findspot’, an exact provenance, all treasure is devalued and archaeology loses the vital context it needs /or an object to have real meaning.

8. Relations between the professionals and the amateurs have often been hostile, archaeologists regarding nasty metal detectorists as ignorant plunderers and detectorists resenting snooty archaeologists as high-handed and obstructive. Helped by the Act, which encourages people to declare their finds by offering a reward determined by a panel of experts, and by the contribution metal detecting obviously makes to our heritage, the two groups have reached a state of respectful co-operation. Richard Hobbs, the British Museum's expert in prehistory and early Europe, says it oil comes down to individuals Some report everything, some will be tempted to slip a gold coin into their boot There are plenty of discreet outlets for stolen antiquities. ‘Some countries have a complete bon on metal detectorists or treat them harshly he says. 'But we are all after the something. These objects don't belong to any of us. Hopefully, we are all rowing in the same direction'

9. This certainly wasn't true in the 1980s in Wanborough, Surrey, where the site of a Romono-Celtic temple was plundered by detectorist 'nighthawks' from all over the country. The looting and wrecking of Wanborough was a turning point. It worsened relationships between amateurs and professionals - but it helped push through the new treasure legislation of 1996.