Britain’s secret army of metal detectorists – who are outdoing archaeologists

But it was the final image that held my attention – a series of holes dug on a Scheduled Monument, a legally protected archaeological site, and filled back in. Nighthawks are also known to ‘launder’ objects obtained illegally by ‘planting’ them on organised metal-detecting rallies then pretending to find them, conferring on them a legitimate provenance. In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Nolan warned of a ‘constantly evolving’ threat while her colleague, Detective Superintendent Jon Burgess, singled out illegal metal detecting. ‘It’s only a small minority out there targeting artefact-rich sites with knowledge,’ Holter told me, ‘but illicit metal detecting also includes a certain amount of people who are given a detector for a Christmas or birthday present and they don’t know the rules.’ Those rules are, principally, to obtain permission from the owners of the land on which you wish to detect and to report to the authorities – usually via the Portable Antiquities Scheme, run by the British Museum – any object that might fall under the legal definition of ‘treasure’. The PAS, run through a network of locally based archaeologists across England and Wales known as finds liaison officers, also has a voluntary element for the recording of items that are not technically treasure but still archaeologically noteworthy.