Monday, 18 November 2019

Treasure Trial Behind Closed Doors?


Worcester Crown court
court 2, case number T20180300, George Dennis Powell,  Layton Allan Davies,  Paul Wells,  Simon David Wicks.
The Leominster Treasure case enters its eighth week today. Initially it was expecting to last "about a month". Sadly, newspaper editors and journalists in the UK seem to think metal detectorists finding Treasures is only news if the state is joyfully paying them large sums of money to buy back the ransomed heritage. That millions of objects are being pocketed by the 'grey detectorists' (aka 'knowledge thieves') and archaeological contexts are being trashed by them is something they are not so keen to write about. I'd hate to think there was actually an official policy preventing that (remember Hollingbourne and the Newark torc?). But one might be forgiven for hatching the suspicion of a conspiracy theory to explain that, despite a whole series of downright puzzling aspects, and colourful characters, reported at the beginning of the trial (unless I have missed something), not a single journalist has bothered  to go along lately and see how it's developing.

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