Nothing can quite match the dogged anti-allure of metal detecting. It is first among the manly, solitary pursuits. An interest in real ales looks glamorous in comparison. Arranging your back issues of Philately Today seems thrillingly hazardous.

A former Westminster culture minister, David Lammy, called metal detectorists “the unsung heroes of the United Kingdom’s heritage”. Yet most of the time, the hobby is more about disappointment than glory. The detectorist may stride over the horizon like some all-conquering Saxon king of drabness, his headphones may fizz with beeps that betoken the presence of an Iron Age dagger, but he’s more likely to dig up a 20th-century wall bracket. Or so we might have thought, before metal detecting suddenly found, lying just below the topsoil, a new renown.

It began in ye ancient days of late September when it was revealed that a detectorist in a ploughed field in Staffordshire made the type of rare find that all but guaranteed a police escort to the Blue Peter studio — more than a thousand items of 7th-century Anglo-Saxon gold and silver. Almost at the same time, a 35-year-old safari park keeper in Perthshire was succumbing to a whim to try some detecting. Just over a week later, David Booth is a superstar of what adherents call portable antiquities, not to mention the new poster boy for beginner’s luck.

Booth’s story this week seemed almost ludicrously improbable. After a little light land research, and having never operated a metal detector previously, he drove to a field near Stirling that belonged to an acquaintance, got out of the car and switched on the £240 detector he had bought days earlier. Inexperience meant he switched on the detector as he left his vehicle, not when he’d reached the spot he planned to sweep. Yet, after a few steps, it began to chirrup. “It’s an American machine,” says Booth in the small lodge he rents on the grounds of Blair Drummond Safari Park, “and I was getting a noise at the pitch that indicates it’s found a five-cent coin, the same tone you get with a bottle-top. But it wasn’t either of those.”

Rather, it was a cache of four gold neck ornaments, or torcs, fashioned in the Mediterranean between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, seemingly straight from some pre-Christian branch of Cartier. It was a dream-like scenario, says Booth. The National Museum of Scotland called the torcs the most important Iron Age hoard found here. Booth stands to collect a substantial finder’s fee once the objects have been independently valued.

Booth shares his home with his girlfriend, Carolyn Morrison, 28, who is also a game warden at the park. Morrison is marooned in late pregnancy before the 50in plasma screen that occupies one wall of the couple’s cottage. She does her best, but displays the baffled politesse common in women whose other halves partake of pastimes inexplicable to them.

“I suppose metal detecting is quite dorky,” she says, her eyes darting back to the afternoon soap opera on the screen. “David practised by burying forks and spoons in the garden — that’s quite dorky. It’s just something he’s always quite fancied doing. And now, I suppose, I can’t really say anything against it.”

Especially not when the six numbers and bonus ball of prehistory have popped up. In some communities, however, finds such as Booth’s are seen as double-edged swords. To most of us, detectorists are sweet, harmless buffs who dedicate their free time to the retrieval of our collective pasts. Dig a little deeper, though, and you find there is a war between archeologists and detectorists, where the old ways are seen to be under threat from arrivistes with their flashy technologies.

“Detectorists have traditionally taken the view that it is up to the individual what they do with their finds,” says Dr Michael Lewis, the deputy head of portable antiquities at the British Museum.

“They used to think they were doing us a favour by telling us of what they’d found. It’s a tricky relationship between metal detectorists and those of us who have a responsible and formal role in the classification of found objects. Detectorists tend to think that any kind of rigour inhibits the enjoyment they get from the hobby.”

You might expect detectorists and archeologists to be brothers in mud-covered mystery. Instead, archeologists see detectorists as battery-powered vulgarians, while detectorists consider archeologists to be sleepy, hidebound pedants.

The relationship is hardly aided by the growing prevalence of “nighthawking”, in which detectorists scour archeological digs in the hours of darkness.

In the early 1980s, archeological groups and the Council for British Archaeology formed Stop (Stop Taking Our Past), an anti-detectorist pressure group. “It is our concern to make it as shameful to use metal detectors on public property as it is to steal bird eggs,” said Dr Kate Perry of the British Archaeological Trust at the time.

“Detectorists can help get stories about finds into the press because of the type of bigger finds they tend to make,” says Professor Ian Ralston of the archeology department at Edinburgh University. “Detectors find metal. Metal is relatively late in the history of objects and, therefore, it tends to be quite newsworthy stuff.

“But the downside of detectors is the temptation they create to not report items at all, of items effectively being lost to us because they end up on someone’s mantelpiece. Metal detecting is such a private, discreet activity. But that can’t happen with archeology due to the conditions under which digs occur. You only have to look up antiquities for sale on the internet to see how frequently this happens.”

In Scotland, any item found in the soil belongs to the Crown and can be dispensed only with its knowledge, a practice instituted by the medieval kings of Scotland to earn them money. In England and Wales, this applies only to gold and silver objects, meaning a more active market in antiquities found by detectors.

England and Wales also have the British Museum’s portable antiquities scheme, whose officers develop ongoing relationships with metal detectorists as a way of tracking what they have found. A similar mechanism in Scotland was ruled out recently on the grounds of cost, something Scottish detectorists say they have reason to lament.

Richard Havers, a rock music writer, has detected over the hills of Lammermuir in the Borders for nearly a decade now, and has even invited metal detecting’s lone celebrity advocate, Bill Wyman, formerly of the Rolling Stones.

“As Bill says, the joy of metal detecting is the rhythm you get into as you swing the detector. I’m doing it as I’m speaking now,” Havers says. “You get in sync with it and it’s definitely very calming. Your mind wanders off in a very agreeable way. Bill and I spent a few hours out on the hills here, then Bill said, ‘It’s rubbish here, you don’t find anything Roman’.”

“You tend to find that metal detecting has a very definite profile,” says Michael Lewis of the British Museum. “Invariably they’re men in their forties and fifties. Many will tell you they did poorly with history at school, and metal detecting is their way of compensating.

“But they can be a haphazard bunch, and finding the thing is only half the story. Most items are fairly useless without a complete record of the precise co-ordinates at which they were found, what was directly around in the ground. We need to know everything. Metal detectorists know a great deal about the objects, far more than archeologists in some cases. The problem is that metal detectors are poor on context, on how their finds fit into the jigsaw.”

“Metal detecting satisfies the hunter-gatherer instinct,” says John Clark, the author of a forthcoming guide called Metal Detecting.

“It’s there in all men, the urge to know more about everything that’s out there. Finding things is exciting. It’s no different to men who go fishing. It’s the joy of the hunt, though some Iron Age savage did the killing.”

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