Treasure island
Britain is stuffed with discoveries waiting to be made, as a tale of cursed coins and true treasure in deepest Suffolk reveals...
Cursed coins in deepest Suffolk.
IDON’T KNOW ABOUT you, but I start every walk confident of finding treasure or evidence of a terrible crime. Gradually this tends to whittle down to expectation, then puzzled resignation that today probably isn’t the day, to finally a Zen acceptance that the song of that skylark or the shade of that oak was the day’s true bounty all along – which of course it is. How much more hardwired the optimism must be in a hobby archaeologist with a metal detector – a sort of treasure-finding teaspoon in the great Christmas pudding of the ground – and how much steeper the daily slide into disillusion, when looking for treasure was really the only point of the day, and the loveliness of the surroundings is moot, and the view virtually unchanging for hours.
So can you imagine the ecstasy, the exquisiteness of ridiculously high hopes being first met then raised by reality, when you actually strike gold – and not just a small, hopeful glimmer, but a great drift of the stuff? It’s a statistical longshot to make DNA sequencing look like child’s play – but it happened here on the very Suffolk walk I’ve embarked on today. And – who knows? – they may have dropped a coin. (Though with the acrimony which was unleashed by the discovery appearing to bear out a rumoured curse, perhaps I don’t want to pick it up.)
Suffolk is an excellent place in which to exercise curiosity – a land not just of buried treasure but of Black Shuck, Boudicca and bumps in the night; Saxons, sunken villages and strange green children; Britain’s smallest pub and the world’s smallest nation (The Nutshell in Bury St Edmunds, and the Principality of Sealand seven miles off the coast). It has an air of possibility purified by the absence of fumes from any motorway, and the feeling that you’re happily trapped in a side-eddy off the main flow of things. To be here in summer, deep in Suffolk, feels like being afloat in an ocean, out of sight of any shore, adrift in a world of directionless pleasantness. Only we’re not quite directionless: the place we’re heading to is a village called (but of course it is), Dallinghoo. ▶
There’s a preliminary patch of Suffolk screwiness to push through first. Between the start of our walk and the fields where treasure was found, lies a small, sinister wood, which sits atop a rise known locally as Dragarse Hill. It’s called that because that’s what they had to do to get its last visitor of note – one Jonah Snell – to the gibbet in time for his hanging on 14 April 1699. Snell was accused of having axe-murdered his father-and-son bosses, before stringing their bodies upside down from a beam in their mill. A blood-covered Snell did not deny the charge, and he was hanged, his corpse left suspended indefinitely in chains – the last man to swing in Potsford Wood. The gibbet still stands – its plaque split as though rent by an unquiet spirit – and Snell’s wraith is said to lure passers-by into the woods with strange lights, there to give them the fright of their life.
It’s a bit over a mile through flinty fields to the environs of Dallinghoo, and I reflect on the way there on the chat I’d had with Cliff Green of Brook Farm, on whose land the discovery was made. “I’d bought a metal detector when the kids were younger” he’d said, “But we never found anything but horseshoes”. A tantalising thought, when all along there was a stupendous hoard of gold coins under ground they must have walked over a thousand times.
It was found instead on a bitterly cold day in March 2008 by mechanic and hobby detectorist Michael Dark, 60. After finding a couple of gold coins, he said: “My machine suddenly went doolally and I knew for sure I was standing right on top of a crock of gold”. Marking the hot spot with a couple of stones, thrilled but frozen, he then went home for tea. “I thought to myself, these coins have been waiting two thousand years for me to find them, so they can wait one more night for me.”
“I don’t think Michael really knew what to do with them” said Cliff Green; “There were hundreds of them. He was just a country boy really.” When Michael returned to the site, he did so with a friend, the easier to dig out what would turn out to be a staggering 840 Iron Age gold coins called staters. They were minted by the Iceni tribe as long ago as 40 BC and buried in a now-broken earthenware jar,
just 15 or so centimetres down, in 15 AD. It was money the tribe surely could have done with – around £1 million’s-worth in their time – when a generation later their eminent queen Boudicca would take arms against the Roman occupiers. If only they’d remembered where it was.
As our steps draw near Dallinghoo’s church, in a field near which the coins were found, I can feel a faint buzz of excitement. Quite properly, after digging up the coins and separating them from soil that he described as like chocolate cake, Michael washed them in warm water, then delivered the lot to landowner Cliff, where they spread them out on the kitchen table and marvelled. “I don’t care what they’re worth. They’re the find of my life” Michael said – though when the resulting treasure trove (£316,000) would be divided up – half to Cliff as the landowner, a quarter to Michael and a full quarter to his jammy helpmate, he would be rather less sanguine. “I sometimes wish I’d never found the coins because of all the hassle it has caused” Michael would later say, after a lengthy legal tussle that cost him a friendship and a fortune. But it was still the biggest find of its kind for more than 150 years, and the coins (now known as the Wickham Market Hoard, for the nearby town) are on permanent display in Ipswich Museum.
There is no dropped coin for me – in fact I’m not even sure I’m looking in the right field – and it’s getting to the time of day when the question rears rhetorically and rather winsomely in my head: will
I ever make a find of my own? Well, not by mooning about the place vacantly you won’t. So in trying to answer that question more concretely than usual, I’d been usefully enlarging my definition of treasure, and the true scope of the opportunity. I’d done that by speaking to walker and certified treasure-finder, Chris Kutler. Driven by his own curiosity as a walker (“Why’s the street called that? Why’s that mound there?”), Chris created the website www.archiuk.com, now one of the world’s most comprehensive archaeological and historic sites indexes, complete with maps old and new, and detailed info on discoveries wherever you’re ▶
walking. The site reveals an astonishing
491 archaeological finds within just 10km of Dallinghoo. Chris told me: “Only a tiny fraction of the land has been scanned with metal detectors, and even then people are as likely to miss something as find it. But the remnants of the past are all around us – and out in the countryside they’re less likely to have been built on. They’re there to be seen with your eyes if you know how to tune in to the fourth dimension – time.”
To take a random selection of our ancient inventory: there are at least 500 Anglo Saxon churches still standing, 700 stone circle locations, more than a thousand Neolithic cup and ring markings, 2000 Roman buildings, at least 3500 Iron Age hillforts, 10,000 Medieval milestones – and much of this bounty is to be found lying unassumingly on public footpaths, waiting to be noticed. “Every time we have a hot summer new ancient sites are revealed just by marks in the crops” says Chris. “It would be very, very wrong to imagine everything’s been discovered.”
Chris’s biggest finds include Anglo-Saxon coins buried in an Essex field which made the national newspapers, but he says a small piece of Roman pottery (like the one Tim found this month – see page 130) can give him just as big a thrill. “I was just out on a walk with my family when I noticed small pieces of Roman pottery strewn all over a field which the public footpath cut through. It had been lying there for more than a thousand years without being noticed – a chance discovery of a previously unknown and significant ancient site!”
It turns out East Anglia is indeed a happy hunting ground. Chris had told me, “It’s probably the best area to make spectacular finds from the Iron Age and possibly Anglo-Saxon period”, something he speculates may be due to its lighter soils, relative lack of rainfall and high sunshine, and the likelihood of local tribes having trading links to the continent.
I’m primed for a discovery, with my eyes taking on a close scanning pattern for the remainder of the walk. And on a path through a field of billowing barley, we find something. Not an Iceni coin, not from the Iron Age either, but something much older – a meaty handful of a flint, with what looked like carefully knapped edges: a paleolithic hand-axe, hundreds of thousands of years old. The grey flint’s orange iron-staining is a classic sign of extreme age. The very tip is missing and the lower half or butt. There are marks of plough-damage. But hand axes were either crude, stone struck examples, or much more expertly made and known as ‘finished’ axes, and this is one of those. To the prehuman ancestor who made it it would have been their Swiss Army knife – a well-loved tool.
All this I learn later through more knowledgeable people – but already as I leave the field I know this
stone, so casually disposed by time, so ripe in my pocket, is my true treasure. We think of ourselves as being outside history – yet in a way, finding something is no less an act of history than its burying, building or shaping. Never mind the fact we ourselves will one day be 1000 years in the past – we might have contributed to the understanding of man’s long story. We certainly contribute to our own. Finding things is special, and the thrill of the chase can add something to any walk (and indeed life). It helps to know something of what you’re looking for, and it doesn’t have to be gold – although as Chris Kutler told me “It’s often the people who least expect it who, to their absolute amazement, find themselves holding the most incredibly valuable thing”. It could be a bird or an earthwork or a wildflower. One thing’s for sure: the more you feed your curiosity, the more treasure you will find.