There's gold in them there hills!
Every year, metal detectorists all over the world find thousands of coins and artifacts that help us to understand our past. Far from being looters, as they are so often painted by the press and academia, the detectorist is a historian, a truly modern antiquarian, employing the latest technologies in pursuit of ancient objects that would otherwise have been lost in our increasingly polluted soil, dissolved by the chemicals used in modern farming, acid rain, irreparably damaged by ploughing, or lost forever under yet another housing development.
The Ancient Vessel of the Rother, The Mirror, Saturday, January 18, 1823.