Treasure hunter in £145k gold haul: I’ll spend it on a house

a hoard of gold jewellery found on a skeleton in an anglo-saxon grave has been valued at £145,000.

One of the items, a large gold pendant inlaid with scores of tiny garnets, pictured, is alone worth £140,000.

The jewellery was found by Thomas Lucking, 23, using a metal detector in Winfarthing, norfolk, in 2015.

The items, which norwich Castle Museum wants to acquire, were declared a treasure find but their value has only now been revealed.

Mr Lucking, a student at the time of his find but now an archaeologist, said any money he gets – which will be shared with the landowner and his metal detecting partner – ‘will probably end up as a deposit on a house’. Much of the jewellery, including a gold cross pendant, was on the skeleton of a woman buried between around ad 650 and 675. she would have been of high status and one of the earliest anglosaxon converts to Christianity. The value of the haul was revealed yesterday as it was announced that there were a record 1,120 treasure finds last year – 96 per cent of them by metal detectorists.