WAFTING their metal detectors over rolling farmland, George Powell and Layton Davies dreamt of striking it rich.
Like the hapless characters in BBC show Detectorists, the pair had tramped the countryside for years hoping to discover a life-changing treasure hoard.
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Then one sunny June day in Herefordshire, their luck changed.
Warehouseman Powell and school caretaker Davies chanced upon a Viking cache of gold jewels and coins, perhaps worth £12million.
It should have made them filthy rich, but instead it became a curse.
First, the pair broke the law by failing to surrender the haul, then bragged about it online and hawked the collection around antique dealers.
When experts urged them to report the loot, they snubbed the advice and even denied their incredible find.
They were eventually arrested after declaring some of the collection to a museum.
But following a stretch in prison, neither fulfilled a court order to pay back their ill-gotten gains.
Davies, 56, was put behind bars again and Powell, 44, went on the run. More than 200 coins remain unaccounted for.
Ironically, the pair only have their own greed and stupidity to blame for their bad fortune.
For they would likely have been entitled to half the value of the bumper trove if they had passed it to authorities in the beginning.
Former antiques dealer Simon Wicks, who was also jailed for conspiring to conceal some of the loot, told me: “These coins have been a curse from the day they were found. Prison is the last place I thought I’d end up in life.”
The grandfather-of-nine added: “I’ve heard George is on the run, which is crazy. If you are out there mate, you should really hand yourself in.
“I wish I could speak to him and talk some sense into him.
‘Stupidly indiscreet’
“I’d say, ‘Do the decent thing and hand the bloody stuff in’.”
Powell has remained recklessly defiant since becoming a fugitive.
When Gwent Police issued a Facebook appeal for his whereabouts last October, he replied complaining that he didn’t like the mugshot they had used because he was hungover when it was taken.
So how did two likely lads from South Wales find — then seemingly lose — a fortune?
The sun was poking through the clouds on June 2, 2015, when Newport handyman Powell and Pontypridd grandfather Davies set out on their hunt for treasure.
Both had been bitten by the detecting bug, with Davies having previously reported more than a hundred of his finds to the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.
It meant they were well aware of the law. Gold and silver coins and jewels more than 300 years old must be handed in.
The Treasure Valuation Committee then decides what they are worth, and the amount is split, usually 50/50 between the finder and the landowner.
Those familiar with this case say it was Powell who seemed to call the shots.
People who know the heavily tattooed dad-of-two describe him as a “character” who “likes a drink”.
The detectorists began combing cornfields near the picturesque hamlet of Eye, four miles outside of Leominster, Herefordshire, without asking the land owner, Lord Cawley, for permission.
Unauthorised detecting is known as nighthawking. Anything found and removed could be regarded as theft.
Buoyed by the popularity of sitcom Detectorists, starring Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones, 20,000 Brits now enjoy the treasure-hunting hobby.
Nigel Richardson, author of The Accidental Detectorist: Uncovering An Underground Obsession, told me: “In a lot of European countries, it’s illegal to metal-detect unless you are an archaeologist. The laws are much more liberal here.
“It’s also popular because the UK — and England in particular — is so rich in old stuff in the ground.”
Powell and Davies were about to head home when a continuous, high-pitched whine from their devices suggested something lurking beneath the soil. Digging through the reddish earth, they saw the glint of gold.
A millennia earlier, the Great Heathen Army of marauding Vikings had swept through here.
At a crossroads of two ancient tracks, they buried a hoard of some 300 coins and jewels — likely looted from Anglo-Saxon strongholds — including a crystal rock pendant, a 9th Century gold ring and a dragon’s head bracelet.
Among the coins were some depicting “two emperors” — King Alfred of Wessex and Ceolwulf II of Mercia.
They are historically important as they reveal how the two ancient kingdoms were coming together in the early stages of the formation of England.
Powell and Davies were initially ignorant of the find’s importance, shoving the treasure into a Tesco plastic bag.
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Then they made a glaring modern-day error — they plastered photos of their good fortune on the internet.
Though they later removed the images, it was described by a British Museum expert as “stupidly indiscreet”.
Powell and Davies later showed the gold and 12 of the coins to two reputable antiquities dealers.
One, Paul Wells, later told police: “My eyes nearly fell out of my head.”
The other, Jason Sallam, was “flabbergasted”.
Retired builder Wells later admitted that Davies asked him to “look after” five of the coins, worth £75,000.
The dealer glued them into the leather case of his magnifying glass.
I said to George, ‘Do you realise this stuff could be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, mate?
You can’t sell this stuff, you can’t do nothing with itSimon Wicks
Wells also said he believed Davies would persuade Powell to surrender the treasure.
Sallam told the pair to hand the stash in, but agreed to take the items to be assessed by another coin expert, Monmouth-based Lloyd Bennett, who was also adamant they must be declared, insisting:
“Everything here needs to be in a museum.”
Sallam returned the coins to Wells and told him to pass the message on.
But determined not to heed the advice, Powell approached his friend, Simon Wicks, 64, a Sussex coin dealer and detectorist with his own previous conviction for nighthawking.
At his neat flat in Hailsham, Wicks tells me he received a message reading: “Boom, I found yellow.”
Powell sent over some photos of the gold, with Wicks revealing: “I saw the images and I said, ‘Jesus Christ, you found proper treasure’.”
Days after the hoard was unearthed, Wicks met Powell at the Cobham services on the M25.
Prison is the last place I thought I’d end up. I’ve heard George is on the run, which is crazy. If you are out there mate, you should really hand yourself in
Simon Wicks
Wicks insists he was shown gold from the hoard — but no coins.
Now working as a chef, he claimed: “I said to George, ‘Do you realise this stuff could be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, mate?’. I said, ‘You can’t sell this stuff, you can’t do nothing with it. Just hand it all in’.”
However, a week later, Wicks arrived at prestigious Mayfair auction house Noonans with seven Anglo-Saxon coins.
The one-time nighthawker insists he had bought them from old friend Powell, who had vouched that his dad found them in the 1970s. The auction house retained the coins.
Disappearing act
Wicks would return to Noonans with a further stash of some eight coins. All were later handed to police.
Today, Wicks insists: “If I thought I’d done anything wrong, I wouldn’t have taken them to Noonans.”
By now, Powell and Davies’ golden haul was being gossiped about among the detectorist community.
A month after their discovery, Peter Reavill — the official who deals with items found by detectorists in Herefordshire — emailed the pair saying that if they had found something interesting they had a legal obligation to report it.
Davies failed to reply, while Powell claimed he did not know what Reavill was talking about.
Yet days later, the pair took a golden bangle, ring and crystal orb to the Museum of Wales.
Reavill alerted police that a heritage crime may have been committed, and in August 2015 the two detectorists were arrested, along with Wicks and Wells. All four denied wrongdoing, but were convicted in 2019.
After appealing their sentences, Powell was sent down for six and a half years and Davies for five years.
Wells got a suspended sentence, while Wicks would eventually serve 24 months after his sentence was reduced on appeal.
Yet experts believed that there were around 300 coins in the hoard, based on photos seized from Powell and Davies’ phones. So where was the rest of the treasure?
In 2018, 44 coins from the haul had been seized when undercover cops snared two English collectors who had been trying to sell them to an American professor.
That still leaves more than 200 unaccounted for in this intriguing case highlighted in new BBC podcast Fool’s Gold.
Then, at a Proceeds of Crime hearing in 2023, Powell finally admitted finding a hoard of 51 coins, claiming he had sold 20 to Wicks then gambled away the cash.
Powell and Davies were ordered to pay £600,000 each or spend five more years in jail after they served their original sentences.
Last year, Davies — who cops said only repaid around half the sum — began his fresh sentence. Powell went on the run.
Messaging South Wales Argus reporter Holly Morgan on Facebook, Powell insisted he was innocent and said of his sentence: “Drug dealers, rapists and other individuals who destroy lives never get that long.”
Powell was eventually arrested in Edinburgh before being released from custody in December.
In January, he failed to appear at Birmingham Magistrates Court, where he was due to be sentenced for failing to settle his £600,000 order, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
Since then, he seems to have done a disappearing act.
The judge at the men’s original trial had insisted there was still “unrecovered treasure” from the hoard, likely “worth millions of pounds”.
Wicks, who is subject to a £440,000 Proceeds of Crime order, said: “There probably is a load more coins, but only George knows where they are.”
