The Brownhills Irony and Tekkie Logic

In a post on Heritage Journal ("The Staffordshire Irony", I love the photo) the good guys write of a statue depicting a miner ("heroic digger of black gold") in Brownhills Town Centre, "while in a world famous field less than a mile away other diggers, criminal metal detectorists, are repeatedly mining for real gold". That was too much for some tekkies to get their heads round, forgetting the "we are not nighthawks" mantra, detectorist Graham Chetwynd (we've noted him before, he's the one that claims to have a video of a FLO buying illicit finds) 17/02/2013 at 14:31 comments, I reproduce it exactly as written, but add a hyperlink:

just remeber if it was not for the detectorists the staffordshire hoard would not have been found and as far as your concerned all of us detectorists are criminals. What about the crinimal archies lol and the twatts like paul barford

So because men with metal detectors located a hoard site, we now have to close our eyes (as it seem, so many archaeologists are already doing) to the continued looting and disturbance of the archaeology of the site by other men with metal detectorists - all in this together?

Mr Chetwynd has so far failed to produce the evidence of these "crinimal archies" and this calls into question whether it actually exists at all. It seems to me UK metal detectorists have a facility for throwing out wild accusations about preservationists, conservationists, archaeologists and others which have no basis in anything but their own fantasies and prejudices, but certainly not in fact. 

The four-letter word has only one 't'.

These are precisely the sort of people the PAS wants to grab more and more millions of public quid to make into the "partners" of the British Museum, archaeological heritage professionals and to whom they want us all to entrust the exploitation of the archaeological record. Take a good look and decide what you think about that as a "policy".

Vignette: Terry Herbert - "if it was not for the detectorists the Staffordshire Hoard would not have been found"...