At a Treasure inquest recently a medieval gold badge or mount found "two inches below the surface" by artefact hunters on farmland near Old Malton North Yorkshire has been declared Treasure by Coroner Michael Oakley. The finder was on the land when attending a commercial artefact hunting rally last April. But here's the rub: However, in a statement, farmer John Douglas said he had not given permission for anyone to be on his land. “I received a phone call from a neighbour telling me that there were a lot of people on my land digging holes,” he added. “I went along and found around 200 people with metal detectors who had come from all over the place. “I found out that they had been charged to attend a metal detectors’ rally but I had not given permission for anyone to be on my land”.This will have been the aptly-named Jim Pincher's infamous Malton Rally, when the questions started, the organizer made himself scarce. [There is a James Pincher on the Daily Moron. Presumably not the same one]. Apart from the badge, other finds were made, one participant asserts: " i just haerd that a scattered hoard was found on sunday to all accounts it was about 15 edwards". This scandalous event and its organizer is mentioned here too: "scam rallies", and here is Mr Pincher's barely literate "answer" scil. excuses. Mr Pincher subsequently tried to explain why he had taken the money and ran, he said everybody was asking him questions he could not answer - so pretty typical artefact collector behaviour generally, hide away where nobody can ask difficult questions to avoid facing them.
As one "Verminator" comments on one of the detecting forums:
The press would have a field day with this ...Detectorists ripping each other off. makes us sound like a load of Pirate's LOLNo comment. Another detectorist is happy that he could get on the land for free, illegally but free:
jimmy pincher,,,,he was the organiser of that rally,,i was there,,,what a shame....on a brighter note,,,he legged it before i could give him my money,,,that was a cheap weekend away...
Sadly a PAS presence is on record ("Comments: An unhappy event", Cf the PAS account with "When the local pas officers turned up on Sunday morning ..."). At what stage did the PAS leave after it was revealed that some of the people on the rally at least were metal detecting without the permission of the landowner, so were illegally searching? Was illegally obtained material incorporated into the database to boost those "all important" recorded item numbers?
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ALL rallies are legitimised by PAS's presence (including the damaging shenanigans at Thornborough and Water Newton and a host of others, and more recently, the one at Foxham that PAS now openly admits was held on long-undisturbed, perhaps never-disturbed pasture).
ReplyDeleteIn my view it is simply wrong and damaging that PAS doesn't publicly criticise the worst rallies at least and doesn't refuse to attend such events.
Part of this could include reviewing the Landowner/Organiser contract as we have suggested, which would ensure that other types of scams against landowners (such as tricky wording to avoid sharing much with him) weren't also legitimised and enabled.
A small point of order: at least four objects from the scam rally appear to have been included in the database. These are invalid, are they not, unless the farmer has said OK since they are the fruit of detecting without permission (indeed, technically nighthawking!) Or am I, the taxpayer, financing a database of stolen goods now?!