The beeps that sound from his detector are nibbles. And the whopper he hopes to land - his white whale - would be a bronze age axe head.

Sadly, today, it's strictly tiddlers: mainly shotgun shells, along with a musket ball from the 1840s.

Paddy is better known on YouTube as Paddy Detects, where he routinely digs up the goods: medieval coins, Roman brooches, bronze age gold.

"I love detecting because of the history, and also just because it's treasure hunting really," he tells Sky News.

Treasure is also a technical legal term, for anything over 200 years old and containing some precious metal.

And the most recently published data shows that we're finding more of it than ever.

In 1996, there were just 24 treasure cases - instances where a found item is reported as treasure.

The provisional figure for reported treasure finds in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2022 was 1,378.

This provisional figure is the highest reported treasure finds since records began in 1996 and it is the ninth year in a row when reported treasure finds exceeded 1,000.

96% of that treasure was found by detectorists like Paddy, who explains the appeal.

"You go out in a field, and sometimes you find junk all day, but it could be one day, one signal that you get that changes your life forever," he says.

"Or a gold coin or a Roman coin, that's just fascinating. Picking up something that potentially could be 2,000 years old, someone would've lost that, what would they have felt."

Britain has a long history - and that's reflected in the variety of treasure that turns up.

The most common type is post-medieval - 34% of the total - which is anything from the 15th to the 18th centuries, then Medieval, (5th to 15th centuries) and Romano-British.

The southeast of England is the most fertile fishing ground, although that may be simply because more people enjoy detecting there. Norfolk yielded the most treasure finds of any county.

The Castle Museum & Art Gallery in Norwich in that county also acquired the most treasure finds - 20 in total.

Any treasure found by detectorists must, by law, be reported - so that museums have the opportunity to acquire anything of cultural and historical significance.

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Dr Tim Pestell, senior curator of archaeology at the Castle Museum, tells Sky News it's a "golden age" for treasure finds.

"What we're seeing at the moment is agriculture with bigger and bigger equipment going deeper and deeper into the soil. We're seeing more and more people engaged in metal detecting as well," he said.

"But also those machines are getting more and more powerful, they're able to seek deeper and deeper.

"But the archaeological resource is finite. There's only so much of it that was put into the ground. And so we're seeing either a perfect storm or a golden age, depending on how you look at it, where more and more of that material is coming out of the soil.

"And as archaeologists were really keen to record that while we can, because it's it's absolutely crucial to know where things were found if we're going to build up the patterns and stories about understanding the past."