BBC Northwest gets it right with their headline Detectorists admit taking Beeston Castle and Roche Abbey artefacts BBC Published 11.05.2021 :
A gang of detectorists who took axe heads, coins and artefacts from English Heritage sites to sell to a dealer have been sentenced The five men admitted illegally hunting for finds at Beeston Castle in Cheshire and Roche Abbey in South Yorkshire. Their activities were discovered when holes were found at both sites in December 2019 and police raids of their homes found dozens of items. [...] English Heritage properties curator Win Scutt said illegal metal detecting "robs us of our past, and whilst this prosecution is good news, sadly the damage incidents like these cause can never be repaired". "Unlawful attacks like these can cause insight to be lost forever," he said. "The ground beneath us is a wonderful library of our past. "Holes dug by metal detectorists cut through these unread pages, destroying all the information forever... just to tear out a precious trinket that will usually end up lost in a private collection."And nobody thought to add that "the majority of detectorists don't [...], only a minority do, but they are a totally different species of person, not bona fide metal detectorists". Are public attitudes to this exploitative hobby changing?
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