All over the UK, communities of metal detectorists, bottle diggers, beachcombers and mudlarks are thriving. They may have different hunting grounds and varied methods and tools, but the aim of the game is always the same: to unearth a fragment of history.
Of course, such treasure hunting is nothing new. Over the centuries, poor people in London – often women and children – scratched a living searching the river mud and sewers for detritus such as coal, rope and anything else they could sell.
Mudlarker Lara Maiklem often thinks about the unfortunate people who walked the riverbanks before her, aware that she and her fellow hunters are lucky to do this as a hobby and not as a means of survival. Not least because the financial rewards are minimal – it is forbidden to sell objects found on the foreshore, and field discoveries are subject to the Treasure Act.
It’s the thrill of the chase that drives the hunters – the mudlarks, the bottle diggers, the metal detectorists – they share the same goal and ‘addiction’, albeit in different forms. But their ‘treasure’ is always the same: the stories behind the fascinating items that they find.
Lara Maiklem
Mudlark, River Thames, London
@london.mudlark; laramaiklem.com
I discovered mudlarking about 20 years ago when I moved to London after university, and found myself searching for peace and quiet, which is virtually impossible in a city. One day, while waiting for a friend by the river, I wandered down to the foreshore and discovered this solitude few people see or consider: when you go down the river steps, you’re in another world.
The excitement never wears off. You never know what you’re going to find, and it’s the gift that keeps on giving because you then have the thrill of researching what you’ve found.
I always find the three Ps: pottery, pins and pipes. I don’t keep everything I find, but it’s rare that I come back without something unusual. I store my best finds in a vintage 18-drawer printer’s chest.
If you go down desperate to find something, you won’t find anything. You need to relax: it’s a skill you have to hone. It took me years to find my first coin but, once I did, something imprinted in my brain. Over time, you get your eye in.
Mudlarking is about more than finding stuff – it’s about the time you get for yourself; that little bit of meditation; and being at peace with the river. You can mudlark at any time, but it’s best when the equinox tides happen in spring and autumn. The river level is at its lowest, so more of the foreshore is uncovered and you can search areas that haven’t been searched for a while.
If the weather is cold and wet there will be fewer people and I personally find lower light better, when shadows are cast. Bright sunny days in the middle of the summer when the sun is directly overhead make it harder to see details.
To me, ‘treasure’ is feeling a connection with the past and with people forgotten by history. The moment you bend down and pick an object up, you’re touching history. Even something as simple as a piece of broken pottery can raise questions: Who made it? Whose fingerprints are on it? When was it broken? What did it hold? Was it precious to somebody?
If you find something with initials or something personal, for me, that’s magic.
Miranda Huckle
Beachcomber, Fife coast, Scotland
@scottishbeachcraftbymiranda
Walking on Pettycur Beach I noticed gleaming sparkles, like emeralds in the sand. They were tiny nuggets of sea glass and I was hooked. Local factories, glassworks and potteries dumped their rejects and end-of-day waste into the sea. One hundred and fifty years later, the tide, the salt and the grit have smoothed these gorgeous little fragments of history.
I fill vintage bottles with sea glass, which look like stained glass in the sunshine. Last summer, I found some rare lavender sea glass. Clear glass can be turned lavender by the sun’s rays over the years,
but it’s rare to find any in Scotland.
I’ve also got bags and bags of pottery sherds. I love to give these finds a new lease of life by making jewellery or collages with them. The best finds are pictorial sherds – from dinner plates or mugs. They’re little pieces of art in themselves and I display favourites in frames.
Once, I found a sherd with a deer’s back legs and tail. Three years later, I found another showing the front legs. It was quite extraordinary.
One of my favourite finds is a piece of a 1930s lustreware showing the iron bridge over the River Wear in Sunderland. I also found a tiny sherd showing the Forth Bridge just a few miles away from the bridge itself.
I’ve found embossed clay pipes and sea-worn marbles – when I find one I do what I call the marble dance of joy!
Chris Langston
Metal detectorist, Shropshire
@metaldetectingholidays
About 12 years ago, my friends persuaded me to go metal detecting with them. Thinking it was a bit nerdy, I borrowed a metal detector for an afternoon and gave it back three years later!
I’ve got PTSD and, when I discovered metal detecting, I felt all my anxieties and flashbacks melt away. When you’re scanning the ground, you open your mind andrelax, then, when you find something, you get a great natural high.
I never go out thinking I’m going to find a Viking hoard. I’m happy with a musket ball or a button – anything that tells a little story. The ‘treasure’ for me is in the hunting. The finds are just a bonus. It’s not
a way to get rich quick, but contributing to local history is a form of treasure in itself, too.
I search in Shropshire, which is ground zero for history. The area has so many castles, right down the Welsh border – we’re in the middle of where the action happened. Finding something exciting can be overwhelming. I take my time to clean it and study it. I use distilled water with no nasty chlorine or fluoride in it.
I’ve found things from every era – Neolithic, Mesolithic, Roman, Victorian, Tudor, Norman and Saxon. I’ve got lots on display at home and there’s a whole case of my finds in Oswestry Town Museum, too. It didn’t sit right with me having these amazing things tucked away in boxes at home.
Once, I found an early Bronze Age flint oblique arrowhead, just lying on the surface. I also found a Henry VI gold ‘Noble’ and a big Elizabeth I shilling. I’ve been part of seven treasure cases, including 42 silver medieval coins, seven Edward the Confessor coins, a Bronze Age axe head, a silver Tudor thimble and a silver Tudor bodkin, which was used to help rethread a ribbon to do up laced clothing.
It’s not all treasure; there are a lot of ring pulls if you’re by a river or a footpath. Horseshoes trick the detector with a really good signal. Shotgun cartridges and Red Bull cans sound great, too!
Jennifer Heaton
River-lark, Greater Manchester
@earthernlass (on YouTube)
There are lots of Victorian rubbish dumps in Greater Manchester that I visit regularly – I’m completely addicted. It’s quite a solitary activity, and I hardly bump into anybody else. I’m out in nature in the peace and quiet, surrounded by frogs, robins, ducks and butterflies – it’s so restorative.
Sometimes I find whole bottles that are undamaged and I have a huge collection now. My favourite is a beautiful seahorse-shaped scent bottle from the late 17th century. I display my finds around the house. I have every kind of bottle – ones for ink, poison, beer, perfume, plus marbles, clay pipes and pot lids.
Tips vary. Some are old landfill sites, or smaller dumps near stately homes, for example. If I drive past a grand old house, I wonder where they threw their rubbish – there’s always a good chance of nice pottery and bottles nearby.
You have to use your common sense and be careful. I always have my phone on and tell somebody where I am. I’ve been stuck in knee-deep mud a few times while traipsing along rivers and streams and I had to use my spade to drag myself back to the bank.
I do lots of research online and I’m in Facebook groups. The internet has changed the hobby – it’s flourishing and there are a lot of newcomers around.
Anna Borzello
Mudlark, River Thames, London
@foreshoreseashore
When I started mudlarking, not many people did it – there were only 200 people with licences, now there are 5,000. I liked the fact it was transgressive: I could be in the middle of the City of London, and people would be rushing about in suits, going to work in banks, while I was in dirty boots with a grubby backpack, climbing down a ladder to this strange sunken world with seagulls and eels.
There’s a lucky dip aspect to it. It’s delightfully unpredictable. You’re in this meditative state, wandering around and then you find something – it’s totally random.
Sometimes it’s something ordinary, sometimes something incredible, but it’s always a surprise. I feel such joy when I hold an object in my hand. It’s like I’ve kicked open a little doorway to the past.
There are lots of pins on the foreshore. I’ve got around 15,000 dress pins now dating from the 1400s to the 1800s. I’ve picked them up, one by one, and keep them in a jar. It’s madness really; they’re such humble objects nowadays, but in the 15th century they were highly prized and left in wills.
One of my favourite finds is a Georgian brooch that washed in on a wave. It’s oval with an engraved copper border and a mother-of-pearl centre. As it washed in, the copper and the mother of pearl separated. The wave pulled out again but I managed to grab it. It would have smashed if I hadn’t been there and picked it up in that moment. It’s so delicate.
Part of the reason I love it is the rescue. I like the fragility and the improbability of it. An object like that was valued by the owner; it wasn’t rubbish, it was lost. I imagine it was owned by a beautiful lady, who was incredibly sad when it fell off.
I have about 1,000 clay pipes, but a little early 17th-century one is different from the rest and very rare. The clay is from North America and it has Native American designs on it. A sailor probably smoked it on a ship and maybe it fell into a corner and somebody swept it overboard when the ship arrived in London.
I didn’t find History engaging at school and used to suffer from this feeling that the past was dead to me. But it’s alive now: a real place that I can access.
When I find a button, I imagine a drunk, 18th-century shipowner staggering down some stairs to the river with his bottle of wine. He breathes out and the button pops off his shirt! Each item I find shines a spotlight on the past, which is intriguing and humanising.
Graeme Rushton
Metal Detectorist, Lake District
uneartheduk.co.uk
I was seven when I started metal detecting, back in the 1970s. My nextdoor neighbour had a metal detector and I was always fascinated by it. He lent it to me for the summer holidays and I had such adventures, on beaches and in gardens. I’ve been detecting ever since.
There’s not a lot of things I’m good at, but I’m pretty good at finding things. One of my earliest finds (aged 11, in 1981) was a Queen Elizabeth I silver sixpence, dated 1595. Somebody had put a dagger through the queen’s portrait on the coin. I always wondered: ‘Why would somebody do that?’ It was quite a lot of money in those days. ‘Why would they deface the queen?'
I found a set of Victorian silver false teeth once, dated 1871. I always wondered how somebody managed to lose them and how they ended up in the middle of a field! And in 2018, I found a very rare Stephen and Matilda silver coin.
Anything that’s found is owned by the landowner, but we usually have a 50–50 arrangement in place, so if anything of value turns up, we split the money down the middle. Because it was a single coin, it wasn’t classed as ‘treasure’ and we ended up selling it for around £10,000. However, the drive for me is not the money, it’s the history.
It might sound a bit crazy, but I believe there’s a sixth sense involved sometimes. You can walk across a field in the middle of nowhere, in wind and rain, and you suddenly get this strange feeling that something important is there. I often get drawn to a particular area of a field and, nine times out of 10, something of note will come up. Other detectorists experience it, too.
The more you detect, the more aware you become of your surroundings, and the feeling there is something there that you just need to find.
I’m a fisherman and the skills for fishing and dectecting are similar: you don’t get instant results, you need patience. It’s a marathon not a sprint. In everyday life, I have no attention span, but I can happily
do metal detecting all day. And perseverance often pays off.
A few years ago, I was detecting in Lincolnshire and I hadn’t found anything from 8.30am to 4pm. I was tired and frustrated and just going through the motions, but something told me to keep going. I ended up finding a King James I gold coin.
I used to work in adult education but a few years ago I took a gamble, opening a little metal detecting shop selling equipment. It ended up being a 24/7 job. Technology has moved on, big time.
When I first started, the machines were very basic and they didn’t have any differentiation built into them, so you pretty much dug everything. Nowadays, they’re waterproof, wireless, lightweight and multi-frequency. You can use them on sand or land. They even indicate if you’ve potentially found gold or silver. I am not a techno-phobe, I’ve embraced technology, but it can overcomplicate things.
Metal detecting is physically demanding. If you start at 8am and detect until 6pm, it’s a long, brutal day. You walk maybe seven or eight miles and you’re digging holes constantly and filling them back in, carrying and swinging a detector and a spade. You come off the field absolutely shattered.
It can become an obsession very quickly. You might go out one day and find a really nice silver coin. Then you start to wonder: ‘Are there more out there? Should I go back before the farmer ploughs the field?’ When you get the buzz of finding something historically interesting, you immediately want to get back out there and emulate it.
The countryside is like a 3D map in my head now. I look at a view and think: ‘What are those lumps and bumps in that field by the church? Where does that ancient footpath lead to?’ I’m constantly scanning the landscape around me, wondering what lies beneath. A lot of detectorists are born with an imagination that spurs them on.
Metal detecting used to be a white, middle-aged man’s hobby, but it’s much more diverse these days. It’s heartwarming to see so many people embracing it.
MUDLARKING: THE LEGAL BIT
- To mudlark on the Thames foreshore, you have to obtain a Foreshore Permit from the Port of London Authority, which costs an annual fee of about £75. With 5,000 current licence holders, the Port of London Authority is not issuing new permits. Check the port services tab on their website (pla.co.uk) for details.
- If you have a licence and you find anything on the foreshore, you can keep it, but you have to report anything over 300 years old to the Portable Antiquities Scheme (finds.org.uk) to record them.
- It is against the terms and conditions of a mudlark licence to sell objects that are found on the foreshore. Licences can – and have been – revoked when individuals violate the rules.
- If you’re interested in exploring the foreshore but don’t hold a licence, you can book a two-hour Thames Explorer Trust archaeology guided tour ‘In the Footsteps of Mudlarks’ during which you can find artefacts (as long as you put them back afterwards). Tickets cost £25, book here: thames-explorer.org.uk/guided-tours/
METAL DETECTING: THE LEGAL BIT
- The only place you can detect without permission is on a public coastal beach. For anywhere else – a park or field – you need permission of the landowner or local authority (whoever owns the land) to detect.
- Under English law, a landowner has sole title to any archaeological artefacts found on their property. Legitimate metal detectorists come to an agreement with landowners to share any proceeds from treasure sales. Those who detect illegally, either on scheduled sites or without the landowner’s permission, cannot benefit from the Treasure Act. Illegal detectorists have had their loot confiscated and can face fines and prison.
- The Treasure Act (1996) was updated in July 2023 with a new definition of what constitutes ‘treasure’ so that many more objects of exceptional archaeological, cultural and historical importance are protected.
- If an item is declared ‘treasure’, it enables museums to raise money to buy the artefact at a pre-determined price, instead of it being auctioned off to private buyers and potentially ‘lost’ to the public.
- Objects of historical importance more than 200 years old and containing metal now fit the criteria of ‘treasure’. In the past, objects had to be 300 years old or made of at least 10 percent precious metal in order to be classified as ‘treasure’. This meant that several important items have been lost to the public, such as the Roman Crosby Garrett masked helmet (made of bronze, so not a precious metal), which was sold at auction for £2.3m after being discovered by a metal detectorist in 2010. A private buyer outbid several museums.
- You must report all finds of potential treasure to a coroner for the district in which they are found either within 14 days after the day on which you made the discovery or within 14 days after the day on which you realised the find might be treasure. Your local Finds Liaison Officer can assist you in determining whether a find constitutes potential treasure and can report the find to the coroner on your behalf.
