There was a commercial artefact hunting rally held this weekend near Buckland Brewer in North Devon which sounds from the forum chatter to have been a right shambles (Fishermansam ,
Sun Sep 29, 2013 9:04 pm and Keeleyohara,
Sun Sep 29, 2013 9:58 pm). The participants were reportedly not able to find the site using the maps supplied at the gathering point. One of them mentions trying to access "land right around a famous iron age castle (sic)" then "the land surrounding a 13th c. market village". Another also headed "for the castle area". The problem was that the fields indicated as available on the map were full of tall vegetation (such as Christmas trees) or otherwise inaccessible ("
the guy who gave me the map was very enthusiastic and said "good things should come from there its never been detected" well i should of twigged on then really ..."). In the case of the castle site, a fellow detectorist "
said hed been trying for over an hour to get to the area that the castle was and that it was completely inaccessible boggy marshland full of trees and very high grass and had given up" so the participants "
made our way to another area with was supposed to be a settlement but either these ancient people didnt have 2 pennies to rub together or it had been detected before".
It seems the organizers had not done their homework and inspected the site before selling the tickets:
we then had an organiser come up and say the farmer hadnt listen to a word the club had said about the type of land to detect on and apologised on behalf of the club and said he was opening up the rest of the land that was being saved for the next days dig
I bet both the organizer and the farmer kept their money though. Throughout the rally, participants were coming up with almost no collectable finds at all (nota bene which was said by all to be unusual - "
evey single person i spoke to had not found a single thing not even the tin foil and gun cartridges ") and the thinking was that all of the fields made available had been heavily detected before, and
thus already depleted of any collectable elements of the archaeological record. Note also one other thing, these people are all
targeting likely productive areas next to ('castle', market town) or on ("settlement") known sites and monuments. Their collecting is not random.
Vignette:
One way to stop metal detecting.
