FEATURE: A day out metal detecting with the man who found the 'Malmesbury Coin Hoard'

The town’s Athelstan Museum was awarded a £47,100 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) over the summer to refurbish and conserve the Malmesbury Coin Hoard, so it can be shared with the community. The hoard, which consists of 1,266 early fourth century Roman copper alloy coins, was discovered in 2012 by metal detectorist Tony Mims, and remains one of the most significant finds in the area.

Standard reporter Callum Chaplin spent a day with Tony to see if he could unearth a little bit more about the solitary practice of metal detecting and maybe discover a hoard of his own.

METAL detecting is a hobby often written off by many as a pastime akin to trainspotting or stamp collecting.

In most people’s minds a ‘detectorist’ would be something of an anorak, mooching across fields in the rain with their devices beeping away, divorced from reality.

Tony Mims, the man who discovered the most significant historic find in north Wiltshire for a number of years, bucks this stereotype.

The 60-year-old ex-forces detectorist discovered his seminal find in 2012 while prowling the fields in Milbourne, and has been scouring around the site ever since.

I met Tony at a field just south of Malmesbury and a stone’s throw from where he found the hoard. He pointed to each field that surrounded us, listing the coins he’d found there. “I’ve had lots of 19th century coins there which fits in with the age of the farm, and buttons and loom weights,” he said. He began to reel off impressive historical knowledge about why he found the coins he had and where he expected to find more, which got me excited for what lay ahead.

While we laced-up our boots, he explained the process of getting onto the fields, which is a mission in itself.

“The best approach is find out the farmer’s name and knock on his/her door and try and charm the socks off them,” he said. “Better if you happen to mention a farmer they are already friendly with. If they have had bad dealings with detectorists in the past then that makes the job of getting permission even harder.”

Eager to get going, Tony handed me my metal detector for the day, his personal favourite, which costed more than my rapidly disintegrating car and a spade. He briefly told me how to move the detector around and what noises to look for, before saying “off we go”.

Feeling somewhat underprepared but keen to get out there and put my name in the metal detecting history books, I got to it, stumbling over the recently ploughed field to keep up with Tony.

It wasn’t long before he got a signal and I scurried over for a lesson in where and how to dig. I had assumed it was a shove a spade in and hope technique, but apparently it is much more nuanced than that, as Tony explained, before digging up a coin with King George III’s face on.

I have to admit I expected metal detecting to be hours of finding nothing, which Tony insists it is quite often, but an early find got my hopes up.
After ten minutes of drudging through the less than forgiving ploughed soil, my detector gave its first yelp. The excitement gripped me as I dug my spade in, casting the detector to the side, ready to make history. Tony was quick to correct me on my over-exuberant technique however. He made me pick up the detector and plot my way into the soil, making sure not to hit the find with my spade as I took aim.

After a couple of turns of the turf in the right spot, out popped a belt buckle, one that Tony said was likely from an early 19th century nurse’s uniform. “Your first find,” he said with a smile on his face.

I felt proud. I had put wellies on and scavenged metal from the ground. In my head I was a sort of modern-day hunter gatherer, but with a suit shirt on and a notepad.

For the next few hours we patrolled up and down the conveniently ploughed lines in the field, collecting everything from coins of Victoria, Edward VII, George III, IV and V, a couple of metal shots, a lead thimble and a buckle dating back to around 1660.

Tony continued to blow any of my pre-conceptions about detectorists out of the water, as he ate up the ground, despite a swollen and clearly painful left knee. His technique for digging once he got a signal was suitably no-nonsense for an ex-forces man. “You can read the screen, but I don’t bother, I just go on the sound,” he said. “If I feel like it should be dug I dig it, that’s why I dig up so much rubbish. But then sometimes the rubbish turns out to be something good.”

After some early success, I hit a quiet run, failing to pick up a signal for at least 30 minutes. Tony explained that he’d had full days of detecting without as much as a hint of a signal.

We briefly changed field, without much success, before regrouping at Tony’s car to survey the day’s findings.

Using a point scoring system he had devised to add an element of competition to his metal detecting outings with friends, Tony totted up our scores. Unsurprisingly I had been roundly beaten, but I was pleased to have learned a new skill and picked up some good pub quiz trivia on coins.

“I love history, the countryside and being out in all types of weather,” Tony said. “Some days you can be out and look across the field and have five or six deer running away from you. It’s quiet and relaxing. You never know what’s going to come out the ground.”

He looked over the fields where we had just been walking and concluded with an air of hope: “There is that possible chance of another hoard one day.”
Sure enough I found myself nodding along, a surprise convert to the mysterious art of detecting. This strangely addictive hobby had claimed another unsuspecting fan.