Based on your recommendation, my wife & I watched Detectorists over the last two nights. We were charmed. It was enough to make me want to visit Essex.
The actor who played Andy, Mackenzie Crook, also wrote and directed it.
This morning, I stumbled over article on the Leekfrith torcs in Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leekfrith_torcs
And that led to the story of the Staffordshire Hoard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffordshire_Hoard
Glad you enjoyed it.
The series though "set" in Essex was actually
filmed in Suffolk the county to the North of Essex. The base for the filming was Framlingham the seat of Medieval power in Suffolk.
Essex is one of the "Home Counties" and is North of the Thames. Its southern border is the River Thames and its estuary stretching East to Southend on Sea and then the coast turns north to Clacton and the port of Felixstow in Suffolk. North Essex is part of beautiful East Anglia. The river Stour around Flatford is well worth a visit.
On the way up on the A12 you pass Chelmsford and then
Colchester. Colchester was the Roman capital of Britain and not London, as most people think.
Suffolk has its coastal regions, and inland. To the North are the Norfolk Broads, immediately to the west of the port of Lowestoft.
They have held motor boat racing on
Oulton Broad since 1901.
Moving a little further south, you come to the lovely town of Southwold, where I spent most of my summers as a child.
This is Southwold harbor, taken from the Walberswick side. The boat you see crossing the river, is the ferry, and yes it is rowed with oars!
A little further down the coast is Aldeborough, on the River Alde.
I captured a rare site last time I was there. I Spritty rigged river barge. The larger Thames barges are quite common, but not the smaller River barges.
Thames Sprit rigged barge under sail on the River Orwell Suffolk.
The county town is Ipswich on the Orwell.
In land there is the best preserved Medieval wool town in the UK.
One last point of interest and referenced several times in the Detectorists series is the
Sutton HOO ship burial.
There is much to see in East Anglia that merits a full vacation to itself. I have barely scratched the surface of what this region has to offer.
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/medieval-world/latin-western-europe/early-medieval/a/the-sutton-hoo-ship-burial