The Curious Gems of the River Thames
23 comments
·January 13, 2025pavel_lishin
notavalleyman
Here's a licence issuing authority's faq section.
https://pla.co.uk/thames-foreshore-permits
>Why do I need consent?
> All the foreshore in the UK has an owner. Metal detecting, searching or digging is not a public right and as such it needs the permission of the landowner. The PLA and the Crown Estate are the largest landowners of Thames foreshore and jointly issue a permit, which is administered by the PLA, allowing all searching, metal detecting, ‘beachcombing’, scraping and digging.
Another section reads,
> The foreshore of the river Thames is a sensitive environment and London’s longest archaeological site, with finds dating back to 10,000 BCE. It is also the border to the UK’s biggest port and busiest inland waterway and must be protected and respected by all that use it.
> The Thames foreshore is a potentially hazardous environment which must be respected; it contains many dangers that may not always be immediately apparent. The Thames can rise and fall by over seven metres twice a day as the tide comes in and out. The current is fast and the water is cold.
RajT88
>London’s longest archaeological site
The English have a bit of a history when it comes to looting historical artifacts. They would like to exercise some control over when they are found, I imagine.
multjoy
The Elgin marbles are named for the Scottish noble who purloined them. It as much a British thing as it is an English one.
pavel_lishin
SEVEN METERS!? Wow!
mkl
It's a largely artificial problem, too, with very small tidal effects originally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embanking_of_the_tidal_Thames
The original marshlands were drained gradually for agriculture, and the land sank as it dried. The southeast of the island has been sinking relative to sea level for natural reasons as well.
From the link above:
> The Embanking of the tidal Thames is the historical process by which the lower River Thames, at one time a shallow waterway, perhaps five times broader than today, winding through malarious marshlands, has been transformed by human intervention into a deep, narrow tidal canal flowing between solid artificial walls, and restrained by these at high tide.
> With small beginnings in Roman Londinium, it was pursued more vigorously in the Middle Ages. Mostly it was achieved by farmers reclaiming marshland and building protective embankments or, in London, frontagers pushing out into the stream to get more riverfront property. Today, over 200 miles of walls line the river's banks from Teddington down to its mouth in the North Sea; they defend a tidal flood plain where 1.25 million people work and live. Much of present-day London is recovered marshland: considerable parts lie below high water mark.
alt227
The UK has some really big tides.
See the river Severn, whos estuary tidal range is 15 metres, and the second highest in the world.
trhway
For your further amusement - tide-proof "coastline railway in Brighton, England, that ran through the shallow coastal waters" :) And electric at that!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_and_Rottingdean_Seash...
" The single car used on the railway was a 45 by 22 ft (13.7 by 6.7 m) pier-like building which stood on four 23 ft (7.0 m)-long legs."
jedc
I used to row in London on the Thames, and yeah, the tides are nuts. The river rises seven meters in the span of about 3-4 hours. (It takes about 7-8 hours to flow out.)
myself248
In my mind, "gems" is pronounced "games", just to mess with foreigners.
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Jun8
Not these gems but my son and I hunted for and found a couple of 19th century single use pipes and part of a brick with a cool logo a couple of years ago. Go to the Tower Bridge, there are stairs to go to the shore right next to it. Good hunting!
pbalau
Before you do that, you need to be very careful about two things:
1. Tide state, witch I did
2. Dog poo, which I didn't and there is a pub I won't ever go back to, as I discovered the poo issue quite late.
mkl
The article says you need a licence, or is that location different?
jayshah5696
Looks like British museum is not only place to get stolen items
tocs3
I would like to see some of the faceted garnets found. The ones in the pictures all look natural to me.
dghughes
The second last photo labelled "Thames garnets tend to appear in specific spots along the riverbank, but those locations are carefully guarded among mudlarks. Courtesy Jason Sandy" you can see a big one. It has what looks to be a five-sided facet that's reflecting light.
adrian_b
The natural garnet crystals have frequently the form of rhombic dodecahedra (i.e. with 12 rhombic faces disposed in the directions of the 12 edges of a cube).
Such crystals may be eroded to more rounded forms, but some of the original plane faces may remain more or less intact.
It is hard to be sure from the image, but the garnet below the title may be not artificial, but just an eroded natural garnet that originally was a rhombic dodecahedron.
The same can be true for other faceted garnets. Only a more thorough examination can distinguish natural crystals from those that have been polished, so they have plane faces with other orientations than the faces of the natural garnet crystals.
TSiege
the cover photo is faceted. several in the photos are
> Only a few people are legally allowed to hunt for Thames garnets—or even remove them if they find them by chance. Mudlarks are among the few who are legally permitted to remove items from the riverbanks. To be a mudlark, you need a license, and in recent years, the British government suspended the issuing of new licenses for several years following a boom in applications during the pandemic lockdowns, leaving the already tight-knit mudlark community in a holding pattern.
Well, that's something new I learned today. I wonder why they have to be licensed?