New UK Detecting Blog Now Officially Launched

I do not seem to have mentioned here the blog set up by a person who's been deep in discussion with myself and Heritage Action. Steve Broom is concerned about trying to do detecting even more ethically than the mere "it's legal innit?" crowd. Steve's blog is called i-Go Detecting (http://igodetecting.blogspot.com/). Despite the fact I've not always treated him with kid gloves when he's commented either  here or on Heritage Journal, he's actually written a few intelligent and positive things about what he's read here already. He writes:

Metal detecting is a great pastime and I continue to enjoy many hours out and about in the fields and countryside of Hampshire in the South of England searching for long lost and forgotten artefacts. I pride myself on doing things the right way when it comes to metal detecting and believe that when carried out responsibly, the pastime serves to be a valuable means of finding, reporting and preserving the past.

I think this is quite significant that within a few weeks of each other two guys have set out to do this, to break away from the string of one-liners and (frankly) ill-thought-through knee-jerk and idiotic statements and cross-cutting themes that is the staple of most UK metal detecting forums. They have set out to present some longer, focussed texts on specific issues, and both of them declare a desire to fight the sloppiness (I think that could usefully include sloppy thinking) of detecting. This can only be a positive thing for all, because it opens the debate in a new direction. Several web resources that were doing this a few years ago have disappeared (Corinne's has gone which is sad) so its good to see new ones appearing. It is especially good to see that they are definitively abandoning the thuggish "Fortress Detecting" approach of an earlier generation of detectorists which all of us are by now mightily fed up with. Let the hobby definitively marginalise the cowboys rather than letting them impose their stamp on the image of the hobby.

So this makes things more interesting anyway. If any other UK detectorists have blogs on ethical metal detecting which I do not seem to have found yet, please let me know, send a comment or email. I'd like to list them in a sidebar.