The treasure hunt is increasing, the number of finds is reaching a record high British News
According to preliminary figures, there were 1,378 treasure discoveries in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2022. Sky News went metal detecting with 14-year-old YouTube detectorist Paddy Hooper to find out what it was all about.
At a secret location in Hampshire, 14-year-old Paddy Hooper went earth fishing – better known as metal detecting.
The beeps coming from his detector are nibbles. And the whopper he hopes to land – his white whale – would be a Bronze Age ax head.
Unfortunately, these days it’s all small items: mostly shotgun shells and a musket ball from the 1840s.
Paddy is better known as Youtube as Paddy Detects, where he routinely unearths the wares: medieval coins, Roman brooches, Bronze Age gold.
“I love tracking because of the history but also just because it’s actually a treasure hunt,” he tells Sky News.
Treasure is also a technical legal term for anything that is more than 200 years old and contains precious metals.
And the most recently published data shows that we are finding more of them than ever before.
In 1996, there were only 24 treasure cases – cases in which a found item was reported as treasure.
The provisional number of reported treasure discoveries in England, Wales And Northern Ireland in 2022 there were 1,378.
This preliminary figure represents the highest reported treasure find since records began in 1996 and is the ninth consecutive year that reported treasure finds have exceeded 1,000.
96% of this treasure was found by detectorists like Paddy, which explains the appeal.
“You go into a field and sometimes find trash all day, but one day it could be a signal that changes your life forever,” he says.
“Or a gold coin or a Roman coin, it’s just fascinating. If someone had picked up something that could potentially be 2,000 years old, someone would have lost that, how would they have felt.”
Great Britain has a long history – and this is reflected in the variety of treasures unearthed.
The most common type is post-medieval – 34% of the total – so everything from the 15th to 18th centuries, then medieval (5th to 15th centuries) and Romano-British.
The south east of England is the most fertile fishing area, although this may simply be because more people enjoy exploring there. Norfolk produced the most treasure discoveries of any county.
The castle museum and art gallery in Norwich The most treasure finds were also collected in this district – 20 in total.
Any treasure found by detectorists must be legally reported so that museums have the opportunity to acquire items of cultural and historical significance.
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Dr. Tim Pestell, senior curator of archeology at the Castle Museum, tells Sky News it is a “golden age” for treasure finds.
“What we are seeing at the moment is farming with ever larger equipment that penetrates ever deeper into the soil. We’re seeing more and more people getting into metal detecting as well,” he said.
“But these machines are also becoming more and more powerful and can search ever deeper.”
“But the archaeological resources are finite. There is only a limited amount of it put into the ground. And so we’re either experiencing a perfect storm or a golden age, depending on how you look at it, where there’s more and more of it.” Material comes out of the ground.
“And since archaeologists have been really interested in recording this while we can, knowing where things were found is absolutely crucial if we are to build patterns and stories to understand the past.”
