People Power.

Once again in the media there is a story about another treasure find made by a detectorist. This story is only about a single coin, but the media states that the finder stands to get around a £1,000,000 for it at auction.

As we all know this metal detecting hobby can be a bit of a lottery, but as with all treasure finds that are reported in the media your bound to get a rush of people buying metal detectors and trying their luck to find their own fortune. The companies that make metal detectors must rub their hands in glee when a new treasure find is reported. Myself, along with many others love these treasure find stories, they are exciting, they wet our appetites and they give us hope that one day we will see ourselves up there in the headlines.

I hear there are some detectorists who cringe at these treasure reports solely because of this new rush of detectorists. They see it as some sort of threat to our hobby, maybe they see it as more detectorists = less land, less finds, less permissions, or more night and day hawkers, more damage to the hobby. Whatever the reason they frown upon it and want to keep our hobby low key.

That might have been good reasons years ago when the hobby of metal detecting was in its infancy, but today things are different. Already thousands of people are enjoying this hobby. There are a few who would like to see this hobby banned and are doing their utmost to achieve this. Some of these anti-detecting brigaders have more power and influence on political decisions than any individual detectorist has and I fear for the future of our hobby.

Yes we have the NCMD fighting our corner but as the heat for banning metal detecting gets even hotter I think we need to turn the pro-detecting heat up ourselves. One way to do this is having more people join the hobby, new blood to swell our ranks, make our voice heard. Its a well known fact people power can change the world.

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