THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 41
“... and if you look off the left-hand side of the plane you’ll see
the smoldering ruins of what’s left of our civilization ...”
• •
finds. In 2001, a detectorist in Kent
found a decorative gold cup dating to
the Bronze Age, more than thirty-
five hundred years ago; having been
crushed by a modern plow, it had the
shape of a deli coffee cup retrieved
from a trash can. More recently, metal-
detecting rallies, in which a farmer is
paid to open up his land to possibly
hundreds of detectorists, have become
common, further dismaying archeol-
ogists. As participants fan out over a
field in the military-style camouflage
jackets and pants that many of them
favor, they can look like a Great Army
themselves, bearing spindly devices
in place of weapons.
Sometimes a find transforms a
hard-up hobbyist into a wealthy man.
In 2009, Terry Herbert, who was un-
employed and lived in public housing,
and who had picked up a metal de-
tector for a few pounds at a yard sale,
scanned fields belonging to Fred
Johnson, a farmer friend in the West
Midlands, and discovered England’s
largest-ever stash of Anglo-Saxon pre-
cious metalwork. Now known as the
Staffordshire hoard, it includes gold
and silver ornaments, among them
decorative sword fittings. Buried in
the seventh century, the collection
was acquired by two institutions: the
Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, in
Stoke-on-Trent, and the Birmingham
Museum. The hoard is valued at more
than five million dollars.
P
owell and Davies had a potential
fortune on their hands, but they
also had a problem. It is standard prac-
tice for detectorists to come to an
agreement, preferably in writing, with
a landowner whose fields they wish to
scan, in order to avoid charges of tres-
passing or ownership disputes over
finds. Terry Herbert and Fred Johnson
fell out after the discovery of the
Staffordshire hoard, with Herbert ac-
cusing Johnson of wanting to keep the
reward money to himself. (The pro-
ceeds were split.)
Powell, who has a dark beard, an
upturned nose, and extensive tattoos
on his neck and knuckles, had ob-
tained the permission of one resident
in the Eye area, Yvonne Conod, to
search a field of crops next to her farm-
house. In addition, he had a go-ahead
from Conod’s son, Mark, who lived
on a farm nearby and also maintained
his mother’s field. But Mark, a tenant
farmer, could not legally authorize a
search of fields that he merely rented.
Moreover, Powell and Davies had ven-
tured beyond the Conods’ fields, and
the hoard had been found on an ad-
joining property—that of Lord Caw-
ley, the preëminent local landowner,
who has a large dairy farm.
The Cawley family once occupied
Berrington Hall, an elegant eigh-
teenth-century mansion just east of
Eye. In the nineteen-fifties, when the
present Lord Cawley’s grandfather
died, crippling estate taxes forced his
widow, Lady Vivienne Cawley, to sur-
render the house to the Treasury, which
subsequently donated it to the Na-
tional Trust. A condition of the ar-
rangement was that Lady Cawley, who
was eighty years old when her hus-
band died, could reside at the house
for the rest of her life. No doubt to
the stifled frustration of the National
Trust, she lived for twenty more years,
taking lunch every day in the opulent
dining room, obliging restorers to stop
their work while she did so. Berrington
Hall, now open to the public, sits atop
a hill with views of parkland laid out
by the landscape designer Capability
Brown, and picturesquely grazed by
sheep. Beyond the manicured grounds
lies Lord Cawley’s current property,
including King’s Hall Hill and the ad-
joining King’s Hall Covert, a small
copse that rings with the gunfire of
local gentry during pheasant-shoot-
ing season.
After trespassing onto Lord Caw-
ley’s land, Powell and Davies could
have knocked on his door, baseball
caps in hand, and made an excuse for
having strayed—claiming, say, that
they’d got turned around in the land-
scape—in the hope that, in light of
their thrilling discovery, Lord Cawley
would overlook a minor violation of
protocol. Instead, they returned to
South Wales, where Davies posted an
image of three coins from the find on
the online forum of a metal-detecting
club. Gareth Williams, of the British
Museum, told me, “The finders were
stupidly indiscreet.”
It didn’t take long for word of the
discovery to reach Peter Reavill, the
Finds Liaison Officer for Hereford -
shire, the county that includes Eye.
Reavill tries to cultivate good relation-
ships with detectorists, often address-
ing meetings of local societies. Ian
