“I started looking into whether lead degrades in water, trying to find out why fisherman use lead weights and researching the composition of lead type, as I didn’t really know anything about the chemistry of it and wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to start looking for something that had rotted away. When I realised there was a possibility that it might not have been carried away by the tide and could still be in a decent state, I thought it had to be worth a look,” he explains. (hat tip to @iamdanw)