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6 May 2017 : Detectorists #
Last week while away in Paris at EuroUSEC I received a distraught phone call from Joanna. She'd been mowing the lawn (reason enough for distress in itself) and in the process lost her engagement ring. She was pretty upset to be honest, which made me upset being so far away and not able to help. The blame, it transpired, could be traced back to the stinging nettles in our garden. Joanna had been stung while clearing them and moved the ring onto her right hand as a result. That left it more loose than usual, and it probably then fell off while bailing grass cuttings.
We determined to search and find the ring when I got back, and as a backup plan we'd source a metal detector and try that if it came to it. Having seen every episode of Detectorists and loved them, we knew this would work. Secretly, neither of us were quite so certain.
Our unaided search proved fruitless. We scoured the garden over the whole weekend, but ultimately decided our rudimentary human senses weren't going to cut it. We ordered a £30 metal detector from Amazon. In case you're not familiar with the metal-detector landscape, that really is at the bottom end of the market. We weren't really prepared to pay more for something we anticipated using only once, and that might anyway turn out to be pointless. As you can see, we really didn't fancy our chances.
We used the metal detector for a bit, but again, didn't seem to be getting anywhere. It would happily detect my silver wedding ring, and buzzed aggressively when I swooshed it too close to my shoes (metal toe caps; they confuse airport security no end as well), but finding anything other than my feet was proving to be a lot harder.
We discovered that the detector doesn't just detect metal in the general, but can differentiate between different types of metal depending on how it's configured. Joanna's ring is white gold, not silver, so we had to find another piece of white gold in the house to test it on.
Soon after that we started to uncover treasure. First a scrunched up piece of aluminium foil buried a few centimetres under our lawn. Then a rusty corner of a piece of old iron sheeting about 5mm think, buried some 10cm below the ground. As you can imagine we were feeling a lot more confident after having found some real treasure.
And then, just a few minutes later, the detector buzzed again and scrabbling through the grass cuttings revealed Joanna's lost engagement ring, lost no more.
We were pretty chuffed with ourselves. And we were pretty chuffed with the metal detector. If the Detectorists taught us anything, it's that finding treasure is hard. Granted our treasure-hunting creds are somewhat undermined by us having lost the treasure in the first place, but we found the treasure nonetheless. And it was gold we found, so justification enough for us to perform a small version of the gold dance.
We determined to search and find the ring when I got back, and as a backup plan we'd source a metal detector and try that if it came to it. Having seen every episode of Detectorists and loved them, we knew this would work. Secretly, neither of us were quite so certain.
Our unaided search proved fruitless. We scoured the garden over the whole weekend, but ultimately decided our rudimentary human senses weren't going to cut it. We ordered a £30 metal detector from Amazon. In case you're not familiar with the metal-detector landscape, that really is at the bottom end of the market. We weren't really prepared to pay more for something we anticipated using only once, and that might anyway turn out to be pointless. As you can see, we really didn't fancy our chances.
We used the metal detector for a bit, but again, didn't seem to be getting anywhere. It would happily detect my silver wedding ring, and buzzed aggressively when I swooshed it too close to my shoes (metal toe caps; they confuse airport security no end as well), but finding anything other than my feet was proving to be a lot harder.
We discovered that the detector doesn't just detect metal in the general, but can differentiate between different types of metal depending on how it's configured. Joanna's ring is white gold, not silver, so we had to find another piece of white gold in the house to test it on.
Soon after that we started to uncover treasure. First a scrunched up piece of aluminium foil buried a few centimetres under our lawn. Then a rusty corner of a piece of old iron sheeting about 5mm think, buried some 10cm below the ground. As you can imagine we were feeling a lot more confident after having found some real treasure.
And then, just a few minutes later, the detector buzzed again and scrabbling through the grass cuttings revealed Joanna's lost engagement ring, lost no more.
We were pretty chuffed with ourselves. And we were pretty chuffed with the metal detector. If the Detectorists taught us anything, it's that finding treasure is hard. Granted our treasure-hunting creds are somewhat undermined by us having lost the treasure in the first place, but we found the treasure nonetheless. And it was gold we found, so justification enough for us to perform a small version of the gold dance.
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| Joanna found a white-gold ring... | ...while I found a rusty old sheet of iron |
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