To mark national Volunteers’ Week 2015, PAS volunteers were invited to contribute a blog post to the new County Pages about their experiences of volunteering for the Scheme.

This post was written by Jack Coulthard, a metal detectorist in Leeds who volunteers in the Wakefield office of Amy Downes, the Finds Liaison Officer for South and West Yorkshire.

 

I first encountered the PAS when, as a metal detectorist, I attended one of the finds recording days run by the South and West Yorkshire FLO, Amy Downes, to record a medieval seal matrix. When I went to collect it after it had been recorded Amy asked me if I would consider working as a PAS volunteer. Although I spent my working life in the computer business I have a history degree and have never lost an interest in the subject, so I was intrigued at the thought of seeing all the little pieces of history represented by the small finds brought in to the PAS.

That was seven years ago and I’m still turning out one, and occasionally two, days a week to work in our Wakefield office. The volume of finds brought in to be recorded has not diminished in that time; as more people become aware of the PAS the number of items that we record has increased. That makes the role of volunteers more and more important as FLOs have a considerable workload in addition to simply recording finds (assisting finders in dealing with treasure finds, for example) much of which is not seen by the public. Anything that volunteers can do to spread that load a little helps the system to keep functioning smoothly.

I usually help with the identification and recording of finds, especially where the work is repetitive and time consuming, so that Amy has more time to work on other aspects of the job. An example is a recent batch of 168 post-medieval musket balls which, although quite mundane items, came from a Civil War battlefield and so are historically important. I know that we are due to receive another batch, so I’ll be dealing with those too – I’m getting to be quite expert at musket balls! I also try to help with as many of the administrative tasks as I can, such as data cleansing which needs to be done from time to time and can be done from home.