Always make sure you have the landowners permission before detecting.
Once you get that digging land you want to keep that digging land, so here’s a few responsibilities we stick to when out and about in the landscape. Now you don’t tend to find treasure without digging a few holes, so responsibility no 1 is to practice digging holes and refilling them. We try to leave the land as we found it by removing all trash and filling the holes, this helps show the landowner you respect the land and will help secure permissions. On pasture is the trickiest, we dig a three sided plug that will create a flap we can flip back down once excavation is over and the grass will continue to grow as normal. As livestock often inhabit pasture our stamp the hole down dance is essential so no animals end up falling in our holes!
This leads into our final responsibility, recording your finds! We report and record all of our finds over 300 years in date on The Portable Antiquities Scheme run by The British Museum and have a good relationship with our local Finds Liaison Officer. We make sure to be very familiar with the treasure act and to not disturb anything we feel is of extreme historical significance and requires archaeological excavation. Adding to the history of the area is just as fulfilling as finding it in the first place and being able to show people our finds on the national database really makes our hobby special.
Find more information about reporting your finds here: https://finds.org.uk/
Treasure Act: https://finds.org.uk/treasure