Stealing Britain's history: when metal detectorists go rogue
If you had seen them, you might have thought they were ramblers or dog walkers – locals snatching some fresh air as the nation hunkered indoors during lockdown. Only their equipment would have given them away: metal detectors, a shovel and a spade, that they humped uncomfortably up a vertiginous path.
They turned off the main road and drove a quarter of a mile down a single track dark with trees, past the occasional house and fields of rolling countryside. It was probably early morning when the car pulled up at a wooden fence, on which were carved the words “GRAY HILL, COMPTON”. From here, it is a stiff, scrambling climb up Gray Hill, towards a cluster of ancient standing stones that loom out of scrubland like broken teeth. Here, if the weather is clear, you can look out towards the Severn estuary.
But these people – there was probably more than one of them – were not here to enjoy the view, but to commit a crime. Stealthily, they beep-beeped their way across the scrubland, metal detectors in hand. They dug four large holes, pocketing whatever they found, replaced the turf and disappeared. No one knows what they stole that day and no one knows how they came to be there; Gray Hill is not a place you happen upon by chance. But we know what they were doing: nighthawking, illegally metal-detecting for historic artefacts, to be kept for personal collections or sold on the black market for private
