I stand in an empty field. It is autumn. Rain has fallen for much of the day and now a little drizzle fills the dusk twilight. Mud – born of the alchemic action of rain on earth – has now formed and sticks to everything. Mud covers my Wellington boots from the heel to the toe and up to the shin. Mud has spread in streaks and patches all the way to my trouser pockets. Mud has sodden my knees, while the gloves I wear on my hands hang heavy and cold with more mud. I should have gone home an hour ago but instead I stay in this field of mud and stare down at the muddy hole that I have dug. I frown and wonder if even now I should just fill the hole and leave. But, of course, I will stay. I lift the instrument beside me and sweep it over the ground, the fringe of this Essex field, and back over the six-inch wide space of the hole.
‘Beep,’ it says loudly to the dank airs.
And then as I sweep it back over the hole in the same fluid motion, only reversed, it perfectly echoes the noise from the very centre of the hole.
‘Beep.’
I kneel. The damp muddy patches on my knees are cold against the earth. I place the instrument carefully on the ground beside me, pick up the trowel and dig deeper, lifting lugs of soil up into the half-light, turning them to the spoil heap that has formed beside me and digging down again, deeper still until the hole is eight, ten inches deep. And with each inch further down in the earth, I dig with ever-greater care and concern, awaiting the touch of metal on metal. Yet still it does not come.
I lift my head and, still kneeling, rest my muddy hands on my muddy trousers. My heart is beating fast in thrilled anticipation. It really might be.
And when I next dig down with the trowel, there is that distinct sound of metals touching. I throw the trowel aside and scrape at the mud with my muddied, gloved hands until something shines from the soil. It is hard to tell in the dying embers of the day but the metal really does seem to glint, to gleam.
I lift my head again and scramble to find a stick, a twig, to work the soil from around the object to reveal more of the metalwork.
‘It’s ten inches down,’ I remind myself and think of archaeological context, wonder if the time to call a halt is now, yet continue edging the earth away in scrapes until there is a twisted structure of exposed metal visible at the base of the hole. The stick snaps in two. I dig on with the larger twig until I feel the object shift and come free from the earth and I can lift it to the light.
I really had thought, an instant before, knelt there upon that field, a lone figure in the dying light, that it really was the gleam of gold that I saw rising from the soil. For more than a moment, the crushed metal really did seem to mirror the fragile frame of the Ringlemere Cup. Instead, it was a tin can. Quite how a can had managed to worm its way ten inches beneath the surface I could not say but it was for certain a tin can and not a prehistoric gold cup. Yet it is that lure of gold that will ensure my return to a muddy field in autumn. It is the lure of gold that keeps the lone figures of detectorists plodding so very slowly over the furrows of ploughed fields, metal detectors swinging gently before them. It is the dream of seeing that untarnished gleam peering from beneath, from far beyond. That is the unifying hope of all detectorists. Only a handful have witnessed that moment, have felt the thrill as they have seen the gleam, have held gold freshly dug from the earth. All have imagined that moment.
In the late autumn of November 2001, in another muddy field in southern England, another metal detector beeped. But that beep wasn’t for a tin can. I had read about the moment in a book called Hidden Treasure. The detectorist was a retired electrician called Cliff Bradshaw. The beep he heard was distant but distinct.
He scraped the ground with his foot and tried again. The signal was still very faint, but the sound had increased. There was something, though deep. Several times … he dug away the earth and tested again with the detector, gradually closing in on the target …
It was the narrative of a hunt. The hunter and the hunted locked together in a moment of high tension. The prey was cornered. The seeker was now so close. Even the metal detector became a primal creature in this scenario.
… instead of a low growl the machine was giving off a high-pitched whine: that meant something non-ferrous … Normally with a tin can – the most likely non-ferrous ‘discovery’ – the audio screams at you and the meter goes off the scale.1
Except, Cliff’s machine didn’t scream. From more than a foot deep in the ground, Cliff saw the gleam of gold. He had just found an Early Bronze Age gold cup – soon to be named the Ringlemere Cup after the area of Kent where he was standing. Until that moment, only one such gold cup had been known in Britain. Now there were two.
It was the kind of moment that I had been dreaming of since the age of twelve when I had finally managed to buy my first metal detector after endless months of saving up. It was really just a section of black plastic with the most basic of electronic wiring, but it worked and made a satisfying enough beep to keep me entertained in silent bliss for hours. I can still see myself meandering steadily over the wasteland edge of the Thames beside my grandparents’ houseboat, occasionally extracting rusty nails from the earth. My greatest discovery had been the silver thimble I found a year or so later in my Uncle Arthur’s garden in Hertfordshire, scratched and squashed but distinctly treasure. But even then, I hadn’t been that exhilarated by my find. It was gold I was after. And really it was ancient gold. Not some gold wedding ring lost in the park, but something from the distant past, something truly beautiful that had been worked by a goldsmith thousands of years before and that had lain in the darkness for an age until I had been the one to let the sunlight fall once more upon its surface and I had been the one to see that gleam as the gold shone again.
Gold lust seemed to run through time, as if there existed some kind of cultural continuity across the world where gold is concerned. The desire for gold seemed ubiquitous. Thomas More wrote of gold lust in Utopia back in 1516. More portrayed a land so endowed with gold it no longer has a value: iron is the sought after metal. When emissaries from the Anemolians arrive in Utopia they are amazed at the gold, at:
so vast a quantity of gold in their houses (which was as much despised by them as it was esteemed in other nations), and beheld more gold and silver in the chains and fetters of one slave than all their ornaments amounted to …2
That Golden Fleece which Jason and his Argonauts were after might well have been born from the fact that sheep’s fleeces had been used from prehistoric times to catch gold washed from alluvial deposits by a technique called placer mining. Think too of that gold mask laid over the mummified body of Tutankhamun. Or of Montezuma’s gifts of gold to the Spanish conquistadors that only fuelled their greed for more Aztec treasure. That can be seen as a collective form of gold rush fuelled by imperial greed. The gold rush in California from 1848 involved a more individual lust – thousands of hopeful treasure hunters came from across America heading west as news of gold nuggets spread. They were soon followed by hundreds of thousands more from across the world.
It seems we all want gold.
In the years when I first moved to Essex, I would drink and play pool in the local pub with a gold dealer called Ron whose gold rings I can still picture emblazoned against the green baize of the pool table. It still seems the most exotic of jobs. In the early 1980s, I had been ecstatic when my Dad had announced that he had bought some gold coins.
‘Krugerrands, they’re called,’ he had said. ‘From South Africa.’
Obviously, I had wanted to see them and though they were kept in the safe in the bank, Dad had agreed that he would one day soon get them out to show me. He shared my gold lust. And I remember him some time later, returned home from work and standing beside me, opening a pale white envelope that held – was it two, or three? – thick gold coins. Yet I cannot remember holding one. Perhaps it was because even then I knew a modern bullion coin held so much less allure than something ancient or something plucked by my own hand from the earth. Perhaps Dad had the same feelings too, or perhaps it was to do with apartheid, but he sold the coins soon after.
Some months back, when I had first met Howard Davis on the trail of the Roman Road, he had been keen to show me his finds from his years of metal detecting. They were carefully collected in labelled trays and cases. Part of me had always yearned for such an approach to my finds. He had happily brought his treasures to the kitchen table where we were having a cup of tea and poring over nineteenth-century maps of the local area. I lifted a round brass bell from a box containing a dozen or so siblings. I shook it and a chime rang out across the kitchen.
‘Crotal bell’, said Howard.
Apparently, they weren’t uncommon finds.
I shook it again and another wonderful song of sheep and shepherds and spring rang out from the eighteenth century.
‘They wore them on horse harnesses,’ said Howard and I saw instead a great Suffolk punch striding across a muddy field to the sound of brass bells ringing.
The trouble was that I had always really been rather a bad metal detectorist. I had all the enthusiasm and desire for both the process of researching and the glory of finding things but not the patience to spend those endless hours waving the coil head back and forth, back and forth over the ground. Yet every few years the desire to find some fragment of the ancient world would return to me. It had done so when I had moved to the wilds of Essex and first acquired the field. I’d gone out and bought a new metal detector with a new-found enthusiasm to know what was beneath that earth I now owned. Over one autumn, I’d systematically covered the ground. At the very edge of the field, closest to the green lane that ran beside the cottage, I’d found that Roman coin. That find had kept me going for a while but the truth was that until I met Howard this summer I hadn’t used my metal detector for years. Howard, on the other hand, was a very good detectorist. He loved the research and he passed those hours in the field with a patient expectation for the next find. He also rebuilt my machine when it wouldn’t work after years of not being used.
‘I’m an electronics engineer,’ Howard said as he handed back my metal detector. ‘I love fixing machines.’
Then he started to text me about digs.
James
We’re meeting at 1.30pm just past Monks Lodge towards Chelmshoe.
Bring Wellies. Could be sticky.
Later, Howard
I was becoming a detectorist again. I started to dream once more of turning the soil and seeing the gleam of gold – perhaps one of those Iceni gold coins: far rarer than the silver ones yet still decorated with that flowing, stylised form of a leaping horse on one side.
And then I learnt of something that was also made of gold and that was far older, far more wonderful even than Iceni treasures. They were called sun discs. They were circular pieces of prehistoric gold that had been worked and decorated, often with the most intricate and beautiful of designs by the hands of the first metalworkers. Archaeologists often officially called them ‘flat discs’ as the term was ‘more interpretatively neutral’.3 But to many, and to me, they were sun discs – round and gold just like the sun. After all, gold had always had a sense of being a physical embodiment of the sun. Even the Latin term for gold, ‘aurum’ meant ‘shining dawn’. Yet only thirty-three sun discs had ever been found in Britain and Ireland, though others had been unearthed across Europe. Most of those from these isles had been discovered in Ireland by people out cutting peat who had seen a bright and mysterious sunlight shining from the depths of the bog as the turf spade dug deep down into the distant past. Most sun discs dated from the Early Bronze Age, though some came from a rather earlier period of prehistoric time known as the Chalcolithic – a Latin term constructed in the late nineteenth century and literally meaning ‘copper-stone’ age. The term referred to a Copper Age when copper and other metals such as gold were being worked just before bronze had been first forged. Each of the sun discs found across Britain and Ireland could be dated to between 2400 BC and 1800 BC – each gold disc was some four thousand years old.
It is the sight of one that spellbinds. I saw my first sun discs in the British Museum and was instantly mesmerised. There were four on display. Each was distinct in size, shape and style of decoration. Each shone. The artificial light of the museum gallery caught the gold edges of embossed metal. The intricate, delicate decoration of each disc had been painstakingly punched into the flattened gold surface four thousand years before. It was just staggering really. I bent down on my knees and the light shifted on the gold of the discs, flickering, catching different corners of the decoration. The smallest sun disc was perhaps two centimetres across. The largest and most stunning of the four was two inches in diameter. Round the outer rim of the gold circle ran a concentric ring of embossed lines, a pattern which was repeated in a second, smaller concentric ring that centred the sun disc. And inside that inch-wide ring pattern was a cross form whose arms tapered out slightly in a manner that reminded me of the ankh of ancient Egypt. I stared from beyond the glass.
That sun disc had been found in a place called Kilmuckridge, County Wexford, in Ireland. I pictured the scene on the day of discovery – a peat bog on a dull, autumn day suddenly lit by a glimpse of sunlight rising from the turf. The information board stated:
Decorated sheet-gold discs are found mostly in Ireland. Two burial finds in Britain suggest that they were worn on the head or upper body; some have been found in pairs. The decoration, made by impressing the surface on one side, is often based on a cross within a circle.
For some moments, I continued to bend and sway before those sun discs so that the light played upon their surfaces. Then I caught sight of something else in a neighbouring glass case that momentarily tore my attention from the sun discs: that Neolithic stone treasure from the Outer Hebrides that had bounced about my mind for much of August – the Benbecula ball.
I started to think of Ireland. Or rather, I started to think of prehistoric Ireland and of Irish gold. I kept picturing a scene on a peat bog and a pair of sun discs unearthed by the turf spade. An online search threw up a tasty-looking report titled ‘Archaeologists discover evidence of prehistoric gold trade route between Britain and Ireland’. A summary of the study was even more intriguing:
Archaeologists at the University of Southampton have found evidence of an ancient gold trade route between the south-west of the UK and Ireland. A study suggests people were trading gold between the two countries as far back as the early Bronze Age (2500 BC).
The lead archaeologist was named as Dr Chris Standish. Within an hour I had his article on my desk. It had only been published six months before. I felt like I’d been given privileged information on an extraordinary scientific discovery.
The title of the paper was ‘A Non-Local Source of Irish Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Gold’. At least I now knew what Chalcolithic meant. I turned and started reading.
The brilliance of gold, its colour and lustre alongside a resistance to tarnish, have afforded this metal a special role in societies irrespective of time and place.4
I then turned back to the summary that I’d skipped because it had begun with the phrase ‘lead isotope analyses’. I skimmed through. Essentially, the point was that whereas an assumption had always been made in the past that Irish gold artefacts from the Copper and Bronze age had been made from gold sourced in Ireland, in fact geochemical analysis suggested that the gold most likely came from ‘the alluvial deposits of south-west Britain’ – i.e. Cornwall.
I read on.
The wealth of Irish gold artefacts from prehistory had led to that running hypothesis of a local source. It made sense. The alluvial deposits of County Wicklow and then those of the Mourne Mountains in County Down were considered as likely sites for the gold. There was a picture of gold oval plaques, their intricate design and beauty evident even in the grainy black and white printed photo. I read that over eighty gold lunulae – those flattened necklaces shaped like a crescent moon – had been found in Ireland. That was 75 per cent of all gold lunulae ever discovered – ‘the remainder scattered along the Atlantic facade of north-west Europe’. I turned the page and there was one – a gold lunula from Rossmore Park, County Monaghan. Again, despite the grey of the photo, the glorious effect of the gold somehow still shone. The intricacy of the embossed patterning was still remarkable. It was so easy to forget these were made four thousand years ago.
I reached the section sub-titled ‘The Lead Isotope Signature of Irish Gold Mineralisation’. The reading got thicker. A lot of elements, or rather isotopes of elements, started to appear within the sentences. My comprehension started to fade. I reminded myself I’d once studied chemistry and plunged back in only to be lost in a whirl of isotopic signatures.
So instead I rang Chris Standish.
He was a lot easier to understand. We talked gold.
‘You can find gold all over northern and western Britain,’ he said within a few seconds of us chatting. ‘It’s more common than you think.’
Instantly, I imagined texting Howard and suggesting we head west with our metal detectors on the trail of real treasure – gold nuggets. I held off.
Chris explained how there was further work to be done in Wales in particular, such as at the Clogau mine, and in as many places as possible where gold had been sourced, to build a more comprehensive picture of the pattern of prehistoric gold usage in Britain and Ireland. Then there was the matter of Irish gold and the now-outdated hypothesis that prehistoric gold came from Ireland because there were so many ancient gold artefacts in Ireland.
‘You could see how that happened,’ I suggested.
‘Sure,’ he agreed. ‘I mean, do you know of the Wicklow gold rush?’
I didn’t but I looked it up soon after.
In 1795, gold had been found in the Wicklow Mountains. Prospectors had flocked in seeking gold in the alluvial deposits of the river that was soon renamed the River Goldmine. Some eighty kilograms of gold were found within six weeks. One gold nugget weighed in at 682 grams. The gold frenzy continued until the government intervened and took over the enterprise in 1796.
We continued to talk gold. Events such as the Wicklow gold rush only served to strengthen the assumption that ancient Irish gold came from Ireland. The abundance of gold in Ireland was clear. One obvious question remained unanswered. Why use Cornish gold? It really was impossible to say. In the paper, the phrase ‘cosmologically driven acquisition’ had been used as a possible scenario – ‘the deliberate procurement of a material from distant or esoteric sources’ – as to why Cornish gold had been favoured over local Irish gold. I had frowned when I read that. It didn’t make much intuitive sense. Surely you’d use the local gold?
I had meant to ask Chris that question but instead we got sidetracked on another subject: metal detecting.
Historically, relations between archaeology and metal- detecting hadn’t been good. The academic establishment of archaeology had traditionally seen those wielding metal detectors as mere fortune hunters, as hooligans only after hoards while archaeology dug into the earth to seek layers of history, to carefully uncover the truths of the past. Yet archaeology also had a streak of gold lust in its genes. Howard Carter’s tale of digging in the sands of Upper Egypt in 1922 and of finding the tomb of Tutankhamun and spying ‘wonderful things’ illustrates how archaeology and treasure-hunting have always been intertwined. Of course there were a few detectorists who would still search sacred archaeological sites under the cover of dark – the dreaded ‘night hawks’. But the truth was that most of those who quartered the fields of Britain with their detectors like divining rods were also fascinated with ancient history.
Chris was talking of the Bronze Age gold finds made by detectorists – like the Ringlemere Cup.
‘Are you a detectorist?’ I asked with mock interrogatory tone.
‘I’ve never held one!’ Chris laughed. ‘I’m more of a geochemist. Mass spectrometers are more my thing.’
Chris was busy enough leading a vital aspect in the future of archaeological research – employing the science of isotopic analysis to redefine our knowledge of goldworking in ancient Britain and Ireland. But he was also sympathetic to the notion that metal detectorists hadn’t been recognised for what their finds had done to enhance our knowledge of ancient Britain, especially in the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age.
‘Have you read that article on metal detecting that was published a couple of years back in an archaeological journal?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said.
‘I’ll send it,’ Chris said.
And he was true to his word. A few moments later, I was sat at my desk with a recently published article from the German archaeological journal Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt. Fortunately, it was in English. The title was ‘What have Metal-Detectorists ever done for us? Discovering Bronze Age Gold in England and Wales’.
For the moment, the matter of detectorists and Bronze Age gold would have to wait.
The chat with Chris had me thinking of further fields.
A week on, I stand on the final few feet of Cornwall before the land falls into the sea. I look north. Somewhere out there, Ireland lies beyond the grey cloud, way beyond the invisible horizon. The water below looks cold and angry. I try to see signs on the waves of those distant travellers from four thousand years ago who crossed this stretch of sea seeking gold. I too have come to these lands in the south-west corner of England to search for gold.
There had been a sense of Lorna Doone, or, rather, a Cornish version, to my arrival the night before. I had arranged to stay with a friend, John Fanshawe, whose family had lived in these rugged Cornish lands for generations. John had grown up in the stone fortress I finally arrived at after driving for hours from the east of England. We both shared the same rather cavalier, holistic approach to directions and finding your way, trusting more to instinct than sat-navs. He’d given me his address and I’d headed for Boscastle in Cornwall and then after six hours had parked up in Boscastle to discover a text message from John with further directions to his home. It had all felt rather deliciously Le Carré. I had followed my nose out of town then plunged down a steep track as directed.
It really was pitch black. I dropped through an avenue of blackthorn and emerged to the sight of John framed in the impressive majesty of a doorway forged from dark, local rock. Behind him rose a small castle built of the same imposing stone.
Even as I greeted John on the threshold of his Cornish home, the lesson in the use of local materials had struck me. The contrast to my own home was immediately obvious – stone versus wood. My cottage had been built for farm labourers around the same time, some four-hundred-odd years ago, yet not of slate and granite, but of oak and wattle and daub – of hair and muck and mud. And yet, I had just travelled hundreds of miles musing on the question of why prehistoric Irish goldsmiths had used Cornish gold when they had a source of gold on their doorstep. It seemed so illogical.
John and his family offered food and friendship and warmth. There were stone fireplaces and stone floors and then a spiral staircase that was also made of stone up to my bedroom. In the morning, John and I walked out across the fields to the cliff edges that marked the north coast of Cornwall, snaking a path along a V-shaped slice into the bedrock called the Grower Gut until we stood at the land’s end among stubby blackthorn thickets and brambles and gorse bushes.
‘Great blaze of yellow,’ John said.
He was right. Against a day of greys, dressed with a touch of rain, the gorse flower was stunning.
‘So where exactly is Ireland?’ I asked.
We had halted on the very last few feet of England. Beyond was a drop of a few hundred more feet down into the waters of the Irish Sea. Even today, without too much wind or rain, you really wouldn’t fancy making that crossing – especially not in a Bronze Age boat.
‘Sort of over there,’ said John, pointing out into the cloud on the horizon.
He used his arm as a kind of compass needle, swinging it to the east where an island could just be made out against the gloom.
‘That’s Lundy,’ he said.
We’d been chatting on the stroll over as to the route those intrepid prehistoric gold hunters would have taken from Ireland. One way would be to head straight for Cornwall from somewhere like Cork in southern Ireland. That would be about three hundred kilometres, pretty much all at sea. Or you could make the sea crossing from, say, Rosslare to St Davids in Wales. In contrast, that would mean less than a hundred kilometre sea crossing. Surely that made more sense. Then you could make your way down the coast in a series of shorter voyages – working around the West Wales coast to Pembroke and then straight south across the mouth of the Bristol Channel for Cornwall. Yet that was hardly a safe route either.
‘They might even have stopped off there,’ I said. ‘On Lundy. Good source of birds’ eggs.’
John had been a leading figure in bird protection for decades. I wondered if it was rather an insensitive reference. But John didn’t seem to mind.
‘Mmm,’ he said.
He was still musing on Lundy.
‘I lived there for some months as a teenager,’ he added rather wistfully. ‘Ringing birds.’
We wandered back past black-faced sheep. The land was touched with the bronze tinge of dead bracken leaves, an autumnal sheen on the northern edge of the land as I glanced back towards the sea. It really was such a voyage to make – from Ireland to Cornwall. Even in summer, with warm winds from the south-west and a bag of bartered Cornish gold aboard, and a steady route round the coastline to where the crossing was shorter.
John brought me back from my imagining.
‘See those dark peaks in the distance,’ he said. ‘That was where Thomas Hardy met Emma Gifford.’
I halted and turned back.
‘See that cattle shed,’ John said.
‘Yep,’ I agreed.
‘The high ground beyond is Beeny Cliff and then High Cliff.’
Hardy had travelled here in March 1870 from Wessex, as a young architect under instructions to restore the collapsing church at St Juliot. He met Emma Gifford as she rode a pony across these cliff-top, coastal pathways – a place he later called ‘the land beyond the land’. It was another of those wildly Romantic Cornish tales, retold in Hardy’s novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873 and then again in poetic form following Emma’s death in 1912. Hardy had returned to these lands in March 1913. ‘Beeny Cliff’ was one of a poignant series of poems he had written of their first meeting on these wild shores:
O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free –
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.5
The rain had started to set in. We walked back inland. John told of his own youthful wanderings along those cliff-edge paths, mainly on the trail of peregrines. I glanced back. Cloud was starting to cover the edges where land met sea.
Back outside the imposing frame of his home, I said my goodbyes to John and headed on south for Truro. As I wove my way along rock-edged roads, my thoughts turned again to gold, and to those Bronze Age hands that held it in their palms. That was where I was headed – to find a nugget of Cornish gold.
It is an inch in depth, a little more than an inch long. It shines with the dull glow of gold. It can be nothing but. I lean in to see the series of smoothed bulbous gold bumps that surround a series of pale quartz crystals. The gold looks as though fluid, as though it was in liquid form and suddenly frozen. It is a gold nugget. There in my hand. And I am not dreaming.
‘So this is from Ireland,’ the voice beside me says.
I hold Irish gold.
‘Wow,’ I say.
I look at the man who has handed me this lump of gold ore. I feel its weight in my hand. Apparently, it weighs an imperial ounce. He smiles. I hand back the nugget and feel the lightness in my palm. Then he hands me another nugget of gold.
‘And this one is from Cornwall,’ he says.
I hold the nugget of Cornish gold.
I am dumb-struck.
It is native gold.
This gold nugget is heavier in my hand. It shines with a far finer light, glowing with sulphurous-yellow intensity. Rather than a rough lump recently plucked from the ground, this is pure gold. It is perhaps three inches long – a sinuous and misshapen chunk of sunlight. I gaze closer. There are signs of edges and surfaces. It looks as if it was once worked and then partially melted down once more. You can see the mark of man on the gold. It is as though it were once formed into a bar – a perfect bar of gold.
‘Wow,’ I finally manage to say.
After a while it sits warm in my hand. When I unfurl my fingers, it has an allure that makes it hard to hand back.
But hand it back I must. Michael Harris is one of the curators at the Royal Museum of Cornwall. He takes the nugget back. I struggle a little more with words as I thank him for that moment. Yet Michael can empathise. Though he is a fine art curator, the Carnon Downs nugget has often caught his eye from its exhibition case.
‘I’ve passed it so many times before,’ he says. ‘And wondered how it felt.’
Now we both know.
The gold goes back in a box for the moment. We are deep in the archives, in the vaults of the museum. Tomorrow it will be back on display. But today it has been in human hands.
Before I left, Michael presented me with copies of their archive records on the two gold nuggets and then we shook hands with a delightful sense of a secret shared. He returned to work and I turned to those archival outlines of the gold. Both nuggets of gold were what was described as ‘water-worn’. Their smoothness came from their riverine existence ever since they had broken free from the lode or vein of ore where they were born. The Cornish nugget had come from a few miles down the road at Carnon Downs, a long-abandoned alluvial tin mine, worked from many centuries before. The Irish nugget had been found at Croghan Mountain in County Wicklow. At some time, that Irish gold nugget had then travelled here – a journey in the opposite direction to that made by the Cornish gold nugget which had somehow sailed to Ireland in prehistoric times.
Later that day, I met Anna Tyacke. Operating as part of the Portable Antiquities Scheme under the wing of the British Museum, Anna was the Finds Liaison Officer for Cornwall.
‘I love gold,’ she said with a great smile.
It turned out her husband was a goldsmith.
‘When it comes out of the ground after hundreds, thousands, of years … there’s no tarnish.’
Anna dealt with a lot of detectorists. She presented me with a leaflet on the Portable Antiquities Scheme and guided me upstairs to an exhibition case of local finds.
‘I get a lot of phone calls from people who start the conversation with “I’ve just found some treasure”,’ Anna explained.
The display case was a finds table for ‘Cornwall Unearthed’, a metal-detecting group whose blue-and-white badge was also on display. Anna pointed me to a small strip of gold ribbon that had been found recently by detectorist Graham Dyer. It was more prehistoric Cornish gold. I stared through the glass. At one end, there was a small puncture hole – a tiny round space in the sea of gold that told of the action of some hand from prehistory.
I was developing gold fever. Over lunch, I turned back to an article that Chris Standish had sent me. I had already read through it a number of times. It was by Mary Cahill, curator of the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, the home of a remarkable collection of prehistoric gold. The article was titled ‘Here Comes the Sun …’ It had appeared only a few months earlier and explored solar symbolism in the Early Bronze Age. She detailed the variety of the designs these discs of gold held:
Some discs have a combination of plain rings alternating with zigzag lines with or without central cross motifs, whilst others use angled rays to form a sort of whirligig motif.
Illustrated images showed a series of elaborately patterned sun discs that included crosses, concentric rings, rays and dots in a variety of combinations. A few days before, I had had one of those moments of revelation when I had realised just how similar the two-pound coin was to a sun disc – and to one disc in particular: a button cover found at the Knowes of Trotty on Orkney, Scotland which had a series of concentric rings containing a cross hatch design of zigzag lines.
But it was Mary’s article that really opened my eyes to the significance of sun discs. She argued that though the patterns were widely ranged, these gold discs could be grouped ‘to form a loose typology’. Their ‘common aim’ was ‘to represent the sun in forms that are visible to the naked eye’. In prehistoric times, people observed the movements of the sun through daily and seasonal variances. ‘For example,’ she argued, ‘watching the sun going down over water produces a number of visual and colour effects that have been observed for millennia.’
Mary Cahill’s point was that the sun discs were designed to show how the sun was seen – both by prehistoric eyes and by our own.
In this way the use of a cross can be understood as representing a sun where the rays appear to extend from the centre to form four arms. This is frequently seen at sunrise and sunset. On some discs the arms of the cross are laddered … perhaps mimicking the effect of the reflection of the setting sun on water.6
Exactly so.
One of the sun discs where this effect of laddered light is shown in the arms of the cross was illustrated in the article. It was one of a pair that had been found at Kilmuckridge, County Wexford at some time in the mid-nineteenth century. One of those golden twins was now in the National Museum in Dublin. Its sibling was the very sun disc that had held my attention for so long in the British Museum.
It was only when I returned from Cornwall that I got back to the matter of metal detecting and Bronze Age gold. The article which Chris Standish had sent me had the wonderful title of ‘What have Metal-Detectorists ever done for us?’ with that mock-voice of the outraged archaeologist. But there was a rather more serious tone immediately adopted in the narrative:
Archaeologists have only slowly started to realise the research potential of the thousands of new finds generated each year by metal-detectorists …
This slowness by archaeologists stems from a traditional and often strong antipathy towards metal-detecting.7
The implementation of the Treasure Act in 1996 and the Portable Antiquities Scheme – piloted in 1997 and then rolled out across England and Wales in 2003 – had meant a huge rise in the number of recorded finds of ancient gold objects. In just thirteen years from 1997 to 2010, one third of all known Bronze Age gold artefacts had been discovered – all thanks to detectorists. There were the grand finds like the Ringlemere Cup but also hundreds of other single gold items. Each Bronze Age find made by a detectorist and reported under the Portable Antiquities Scheme meant a ‘find-spot’, which could be subsequently explored by archaeological investigation. Not only was the gold item brought to light but its context could then also be studied.
In fact, the truth was that since records had been made of the earliest finds all the way through to the present day, ‘only 17 of the 371 findings [of Bronze Age gold] were made during archaeological excavations’. The reality was that our knowledge of Bronze Age gold came not from the work of archaeology but from the labours of others:
The overwhelming majority of Bronze Age gold discoveries found in England and Wales have been made by farm labourers and other ground workers, antiquarian excavators, and metal-detectorists – not professional archaeologists.8
It made sense but it was also good to read it in black and white – and in an archaeological journal. It was amateurs who had always brought Bronze Age gold to light. Detectorists were merely a modern incarnation of the eighteenth-century antiquarians who had done so much to lay the ground work for the subject that would become known as archaeology.
I thought of that glorious sun disc that had held me rapt in the British Museum. Mary Cahill had just sent me some more material that detailed how that particular sun disc and its twin had been found ‘near a great stone cross’ at Kilmuckridge in what was then County Waterford. They had subsequently been bought in 1840 by Mr Redmond Anthony who Cahill described as ‘innkeeper, collector, dealer and amateur antiquarian’. Anthony had possessed a ‘custom-made bog oak case’ in which he kept his remarkable collection of Bronze Age gold artefacts. They were part of his own ‘museum’ at his home at Piltown, County Kilkenny. For a small entrance fee (that was donated to a local ‘Fever Hospital’), visitors were welcome to view this collection. After his death in 1848, Redmond Anthony left not only his artefacts but an archive of letters that provided details about the provenance of many of his antiquities. One letter, dated 14 April 1840, was addressed to a fellow antiquarian and collector called George Petrie and told of Anthony’s recent acquisition of the Kilmuckridge sun discs:
… a few days ago I got at Enniscorthy a pair of splendid ones [sun discs, or ‘thin plates of gold’ as Anthony called them] and send you a rough sketch of one, the other being precisely the same, both weigh nearly ½ an oz. and 3 inches in diameter. Indeed, I believe they are the largest as yet found and as all such things are pure gold … and have a very imposing appearance. I know they imposed on me.9
Over a century and a half later, one had certainly imposed on me, too.
What Mr Anthony wouldn’t have known, and nor had anyone else known until a few months ago, was that the gold from that stunning three thousand year old slice of Bronze Age sunlight had come from a far distant corner of Cornwall.