'The touch of the kings and the breath of the wind': Feeling the Local Past in Detectorists

Abstract

In this paper I will discuss the representation of amateur historical practice in Mackenzie Crook’s gentle comedy about metal detecting, Detectorists (2014-17 and 2022), exploring how it portrays metal detecting as channelling an empathetic, experiential attunement to the local historical past. Applying a hermeneutic-phenomenological framework, I will trace how the characters’ deep in situ relationship with their locality affords them an intuitive capacity to re-experience events of its distant past. Through key examples I will also show how the program uses cinematography, sound design, historical re-enactment, and a comedic treatment of folk horror motifs to create a distinctive bucolic atmosphere — a sense of place-in-time that evokes the long intergenerational history of humans living in, and reshaping, their habitats. I will, finally, situate the program within its volatile Brexit-era context, arguing that it navigates both political rupture and ontological insecurity in a way that manages to hold conservative historical emotions and progressive social values in equipoise, forging a historical sense of place that nevertheless avoids the traps of insular nationalism.

Bio

Louise D’Arcens is Professor and Discipline Chair of Literature at Macquarie University. She is the author of Detectorists: Feeling for the Past (forthcoming 2026), World Medievalism (2021), Comic Medievalism (2014), Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840-1910 (2011), and many essays on medievalism and medieval literature. She is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (2016), and co-edited Medieval Literary Voices (2022), International Medievalism and Popular Culture (2014), The Unsociable Sociability of Women’s Lifewriting (2010), Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars (2004), and nine special journal issues on medievalism. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, a former ARC Future Fellow and former Director of the MQ node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 1100-1800.