Focus on UK Artefact Hunting: One Year Ago

.
It was exactly a year ago that I went to the police about an incident outside our home involving a member of my family and a UK metal detectorist's threats. He had announced that as a result of my blogging about artefact hunting and collecting he would get his metal detecting mates in Poland to 'visit' me, which was followed by some suspicious activity on the blog. I temporarily closed the blog as a precautionary measure:

http://paul-barford.blogspot.com/2011/09/pachi-blog-offline.html

When it came back online, viewer figures were very low, but after a few weeks they had almost doubled. Particularly popular nowadays are posts in the series "focus on UK metal detecting" which I began as a response to the lack of any reaction from UK so-called "responsible metal detectorists" to this course of events. Apparently they see nothing particularly wrong or unexpected in such things, which says a lot for the milieu in general.

Coincidentally (?), it was only yesterday that UK metal detectorist John Howland writing on the "Stout Standards" blog was reminiscing about this event:

There are of course  those who claim (with some justification) that he should have thought about the consequences before gobbing-off at all and sundry, had he been that concerned about his family’s safety in the first place.

Let us just take a moment however to consider that my blog in fact discusses heritage issues such as artefact hunting and the no-questions-asked  antiquities trade. Hardly, one would have thought the sort of taboo topic over which one would normally have to consider "the safety of one's family". So why would one have to do that if all artefact hunters and antiquity traders are the decent upright folk they'd have the world believe?