Treasure Trove

 The Snettisham Hoard.....

The Great Torc

Imagine this.  A state of uncertainty, even crisis.  You don't trust the bankers (despite recent hikes the interest rate is still negligible for deposits).  You actually don't trust anyone, as a succession of leaders have proved themselves to be self-serving charlatans without clear ideas....  You have in your possession a certain amount of hard won valuables.  A handful of money and some expensive, if impractical jewellery.  There is a war in Europe and there is talk of an invasion.  You don't want to lose everything. You want to preserve something for your children.  What you gonna do? 

Of course, you dig a hole.  Quite a deep one, and you place your best pieces in a container deep in the hole.  You then infill some of the cavity.  Then you place some of your lesser treasures in another container, place that in the hole and cover everything with soil.  Job done.

Well, near where I now live, there was some unusual activity a few years before Julius Caesar dreamed of extending the Roman Empire beyond the shores of the EU.  Someone (or some persons) decided to bury several crates or containers of treasure (jewellery, ornaments and other various pieces of gold and valuable metal alloys).  And, perhaps in order to confuse potential robbers, the best items were buried well beneath some of the lesser pieces.

It is not known who was responsible for this primitive exercise in safe depositing, nor why such an amount was interred, but when it was unearthed it constituted the single greatest Iron Age treasure trove (I love that otherwise obsolete use of Latin, now still the root of trovare - to find - in Italian) discovered in this part of the world.  One theory is that the rulers of the Iceni Tribe felt the need to conceal much of their important ritual precious metal pieces beneath their treasury.

Fast forward to 1948.  By now, not surprisingly, those who buried the above treasures, or who might have heard rumours of the same, are well dead. But post-war agricultural developments meant that a certain field was no longer planted with lavender and a tractor was employed to drag a modern deep plough across the plot.  The driver (Mr R L Williams) found his plough had snagged some metallic objects, which, on inspection were deemed to be part of an old brass bedstead, and so they were piled at the edge of the field.

The roadside today (no treasure visible from the bus)

A passing expert (who just happened by) thought further excavation was merited, and a number of gold and silver artefacts, including bracelets, torcs - or torques - (a kind of open necklace) and some coins came to light.

Picture courtesy of the British Museum

In 1950, the tractor driver (on this occasion Mr Tom Rout) hit the jackpot and turned up further articles of value, including the finest torc of all.

Tom F Rout

With the help of box scrapers and metal detectors, further work was carried out in 1964, 1968, 1973 and 1989.   The combined finds from this field constituted the first large group of Iron Age metal work to be found in England and Wales which included coinage, and this enabled the finds to be dated between 100 BCE and 25 BCE, with the probable time of concealment being between 25 BCE and 10 CE.  

To quote the magazine Current Archaeology, from May 2007, The best evidence for the dating of the hoards comes from the coins, of which there were some 234 in all: indeed five of the hoards contained coins. They are all Celtic coins, of the early, uninscribed variety, the majority being Gallo-Belgic imports, as well as some early British types. These early Gallo-Belgic are dated to around 70 BC.....

Why is this of interest or importance?  Well one simple reason is related to an examination currently set for those aspiring to British Citizenship. The other day the Times newspaper published ten questions extracted from this test:  look closely at question 3.....

 

and then look at the answer printed below.  Then compare with the evidence from the Snettisham Hoard (among other Iron Age finds.....)  I am so very glad I am not interested in becoming a British Citizen!

Anyway..... The Snettisham Treasure is a wonder in itself.  Who buried it and why, and how it remained undiscovered for so long remain mysteries.  But the fact that metal workers some two thousand years ago or more were so skilled is to be marvelled at, if only because in this so much more civilised age  some people still understand so little of what it means to be civilised....  And it wasn't just one person.  The Great Torc, for example, is made of strands of twisted alloy that would have taken three to twine.

At the present time, the Snettisham Hoard is divided between Norwich Castle Museum and The British Museum, where it lies alongside other indigenous treasures as the Mildenhall Great Dish and the Sutton Hoo Helmet, not to mention a few bits and pieces looted from the rest of the world....

There were, it should be mentioned, other finds in this area, such as the Snettisham Jeweller's Hoard, buried around 155 CE and discovered in 1985.

And then there are the hordes (Tangles) of Knot that flock across the Wash at exceptional high tides.  (Excuse the pun....)

For most people, however, it is the Iron Age Treasure that is the Torc of the town, and justifiably so..... 

Though, for me, there is only one treasure, and that is personal.....

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:

But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

St Matthew, Chapter 6, verses 19 - 21

Imagine this. A state of financial crisis. You don't trust the bankers. You actually don't trust anyone, as a succession of politicians have proved themselves to be self-serving and corrupt with scrambled fantasies.... You have earned a few savings and are paying off a mortgage loan. There is a war in Europe and there is talk of an invasion. There is also talk of austerity, of tax hikes and service cuts.  And there is  rampant inflation. You don't want to lose everything. You want to preserve something for your children. 

What are you going to do?

Putting Suffolk on the Map

A love song for Suffolk.....

The land of the South Folk, or Suffolk as it is now called, is a part of East Anglia that I have become curiously fond of.  It isn't a part of the country I knew at all when I was younger, but we started exploring with our girls some twenty years ago.  Then I read W G Sebald's entrancing The Rings of Saturn, which added to the allure. 

We stay at The Eel's Foot Inn, and walk to the sea near the Sizewell Nuclear Power stations, watched warily by one of the Konik Polski ponies that graze by the ruins of the twelfth century remains of Leiston Abbey.

Sizewell A was shut down at the end of 2006.  A week later it was found that some 40,000 gallons of water from the pond where spent reactor fuel was being kept had leaked out and into the North Sea.  This Konik Polski  had obviously drunk of the delightfully glowing waste.....

Sizewell B (whose bright white dome dominates the scene) is run by EDF (Électricité de France S.A., a French electric utility company, largely owned by the French state) who intend to keep it going until 2055 (Brexiteers eat your hearts out) despite emergency shut downs in 2008, 2010 and 2012.... 

Sizewell C, another EDF reactor, is a project, like Hinkley Point C, due to be completed with the Chinese.  Oh! What price sovereignty?

Anyway, we walk back to the Eel's Foot (another by-product of nuclear power?) through the RSPB Reserve at Minsmere, in time for the weekly folk night, where ageing minstrels serenade us from their word sheets with The Last Thing on my Mind, a strangely appropriate song under the circumstances.....

Ben Britt and Bill Budd

The morning after we drift down the coast to Aldeburgh, home of Benjamin Britten.  I waxed a little lyrical about this place and its  tin scallop in August 2013 (see my blog entitled Great Britten) so won't eulogise unnecessarily.  

Its shingle beach is scruffily used and the pastel shaded holiday homes evoke the future of holidays by the North Sea (when Europe is way beyond the Dogger Bank).

And the produce fished up is smoked in the Meerschaums of locals who welcome the money of strangers.....

But I sense a slight tension when I note a photo of the Springwatch team on the wall.  The face of Chris Packham had been cut out....  He should be shot! extols our fish-smoking brother.  Protecting crows and pigeons?  He should be shot.....

"Starry Vere, God Bless you!"

Sutton Wat?

Slightly dazed we motor on.  We stop to pay our respects to the dead at Sutton Hoo, where nothing is as it used to be.  The visitor centre is in a state of upheaval, as £4m worth of work proceeds to ready expositions in the High Hall to rival the Titanic in Belfast.  If there was an Anglo-Saxon King alive today, he'd be turning in his grave.....

It's which?

And so we proceed, suffolkating under the weight of Kulture and Anarchy on offer all around.  We moor at the Novotel Ipswich, and quench our thirst at the Briarbank Bar and Brewery (a long time favourite) which is hard by the Custom House and the mighty Orwell.  

It is a little known fact that Ipswich is the 42nd most populous town in England and Wales.  But it is the home of the UK's newest University (prior to 2016, Suffolk was one of the only counties in England not to have one at all) and, in 2017, the Royal Mail (who he? Ed.) voted Ipswich the seventh most desirable place to live and work in England....

The seventh?

.... Despite the fact that many people know it as the home of the Suffolk Strangler (though he was originally from Norfolk), Steve Wright, responsible for the murder of five Ipswich female prostitutes in 2006 (committed to Life Imprisonment in 2008).   

The Car Stall on the Hill

And speaking of crimes against humanity....

Benjamin Joseph Levin and Edward Christopher Sheeran are famous people. The latter, at least, is one of the only famous people (if you discount Robert Hindes Groome or Frederick Bird) ever to have come from Framlingham (which Country Life Magazine voted, in 2006, the number one place to live in the country) and between them the two writ a song about the Castle on the Hill, the official video of which has been seen 372,289,930 times on YouTube (though only 2.2 million liked it - and 68,000 actually took the trouble to say they didn't!)

These figures may have something to do with the lyrics, such as:

We found weekend jobs, when we got paid

We'd buy cheap spirits and drink them straight 

Me and my friends have not thrown up in so long, oh how we've grown

But I can't wait to go home

and, perhaps more memorably:

I'm on my way

Driving at ninety down those country lanes

Singing to "Tiny Dancer" 

And I miss the way you make me feel, and it's real 

We watched the sunset over the castle on the hill 

Over the castle on the hill 

Over the castle on the hill

Mr Sheeran, when interviewed on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show, had this to say about his masterpiece:

This is a love song for Suffolk, because I don’t think anyone has ever done that.

That was the second song I completed for the album, so… I’ve listened to that more times than anything else, and it just sounds completely different. I wrote that mid-2015.

I shot the music video in Suffolk, and they cast a group of friends from my high school, and all the extras are kids from my high school, and the main guy, who looks exactly like me, is in my sixth form. It’s really weird.

So it’s all putting Suffolk on the map.

Perhaps, dear reader, you should be the judge of that?

https://youtu.be/K0ibBPhiaG0

Hey! Wayne....

And so to PC Jack, RA, the painter of Dedham Vale....

We are on our way home, now, and stop at Flatford Mill for breakfast (the Ipswich Novotel breakfast was neither to our tastes nor our pocket....)   Flatford is remarkably unspoiled (at this hour) and Willy Lott's cottage still stands more or less where Constable painted it.....

And the dry dock where he pictured Boat Building near Flatford Mill (in the V and A) is still pretty dry.....  (certainly drier than witnessed in  my 2014 Blog, Mr Constable....)

Flatford Mill itself is a Field Studies Centre, but none the worse for that.....  It really is lovely round here....  The village of East Bergholt, the river Stour....  

Constable Country....  

So, there we are....  it’s all putting Suffolk on the map.....  

A love song to Suffolk.... 

because I don’t think anyone has ever done that.....

Ever read Ronald Blythe, Ed?  

Or Roger Deakin?

Or W G Sebald?


(or my 2013 Blog, Great Britten?)


(or my 2014 Blog, Mr Constable?)


A love song to Suffolk

Nobody done that!

Merrie England - Part Two

WINTER

  

“The benches filled with famous men

Who fell to with relish; round upon round

Of mead was passed…..”

What could be more English?  Driving round the M25 in something like Brown Windsor soup at the tail end of December.  Spray and darkness combining to reduce visibility to the brake lights of the vehicle in front; the sky like a plaster ceiling about to collapse under the weight of an over-flowing bath above. 

And for what?  A holiday?  A trip to the seaside?  Surely this is as daft as it gets?  When the sapient majority is either on the beach at Sharm el Sheik or watching Match of the Day or The Great British Bake Off at home, why submit to the perils of aquaplaning into a traffic tsunami?

Well, for one, we are “British.”  And two, I have been reading Beowulf…… And, if I need a third, I am looking for “Merrie England” in the depth of winter - and not a Pickwickian snowscape neither, no twirling on pigs’ bones across the frozen Thames, nor too-hot-to-handle chestnuts to warm the cockles….

So whereto? 

First, into the past.  High above the swollen Deben estuary, across the water from the port of Woodbridge, in Suffolk.  It’s cold, and damp and deserted, but for some 1300 years here lay a remarkable man, buried with his ship and an unsurpassed collection of finery.  This is Sutton Hoo, and here we can taste the strands that formed the weft that became woven into England. 

The site would have been inhabited since the Stone Age, and was undoubtedly known to the Romans, whose roads passed nearby, but by the year 625AD the Romans had been gone for two hundred years, and a new power was developing, which would form the basis of the culture of this land, ready for the layering of invasion, religion and trade that added colour and texture over the centuries. 

The treasures that were buried here, with their historical and cultural values, were undiscovered until the owner of the land, Mrs E M Pretty, invited the archaeologist Basil Brown to open the mysterious mounds in 1938.  What he found, among other things, was the remains of a twenty-seven metre long ship, and when Charles Philips took over in 1939 silver and gold, enamels and jewels came to light, brilliant examples of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic art, as well as objects of everyday life, such as textiles, utensils and weapons.  An ornate helmet, seeming to frame a pair of raybans; a sword that was beaten from twisted threads of steel, manufactured with the greatest technological skill; a lyre which would have been plucked in accompaniment to songs of war and peace; a shield, embossed with golden animals whose eyes shine red with garnets, and a whetstone carved from one of the hardest stones known to man, topped with a stag finial, possibly used as a sceptre to denote the rank of a king.

After the Second World War the British Museum began a research programme and gradually the discoveries were analysed and understanding grew.  In 2002 the site was opened to the public, and, although the actual artefacts are in London, it is fascinating and atmospheric, even in the gloom of December.  There is a glory about this celebration of death, as it celebrates life, and through the patience of those involved the continuity of our past becomes more tangible, more relevant, and I suppose I can feel more purpose in a society which valued art, and which cared for the dead as if they live on.  We view a short film about the site and the world it explores, and while we are visiting a guide expounds on the traditions of feasting in those dark days.  It fits with Beowulf, as retold by Seamus Heaney:

“They sang then and played to please the hero,

Words and music for their warrior prince,

Harp tunes and tales of adventure:

There were high times on the hall benches…..”

There is the Janus effect.  We look backwards and we look forwards.  At this pivotal point of the year, with the darkest days behind, our hopes rekindle, but they are hopes built on experience.  So the marvels buried at Sutton Hoo inform our future: if this is how it was, then why should it not be better?

We return to the present, and move on to our accommodation, at the quaintly (and inexplicably, though it may derive from a local type of eel trap) named Eel’s Foot Inn at Eastbridge.  From here it is a pleasant, if waterlogged, walk to the RSPB Reserve at Minsmere, and the coast from Dunwich to Sizewell. 

Here, between coastguard cottages and the mosque-like white dome of Sizewell B, birds and animals are protected, at least from man (for the moment, though we do not yet know about Sizewell C!) in reed beds and woods.   

This is one of the RSPB’s flagship reserves, with excellent facilities and a number of hides and walks.  The variety of birds is dazzling and serious birdwatchers will return in all seasons, and there are also Konik ponies and deer to see. 

We are fairly lightweight when it comes to identifying distant shapes, but are spellbound by the views from the Island Mere and Bittern Hides.  I just miss seeing an otter (but am shown a picture of it, strangely taken on exactly the same camera and with exactly the same lens as I have) but succeed in counting nine Marsh Harriers circling and settling in the dusk.

After a grey and washed out day the sun slips below the cloud cover and suddenly illuminates the scene, side-lighting the reeds and silhouetting the bare trees in the distance. 

Flights of birds sweep in, dark shapes against the sky. 

It is glorious, and I suddenly think of the warrior in his boat tomb, the years in between dissolved as time sheers away to nightfall.

We walk back to the pub.  The road and flooded fields gleaming in the last of the light.  A wood-burner glows warm in the inglenook, and we restore ourselves with homely food and ancient ale.  A gathering of musicians materialises round the fire, and instruments are tuned to the background of harmonious chatter.  Songs begin to flutter in the hall, and I imagine horns of mead passing from friend to friend.

The musicians take their turns, and their airs illustrate the intermingling of folk, from a tune by O’Carolan, the eighteenth century Irish harpist and composer, to shanties from the seafaring past; from an a capella rendering of Bob Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Leather,” which exposes its Celtic origins, to a deftly performed cover of Phil Ochs’s “There But For Fortune,” which was a commercial success for Joan Baez in 1964.  The array of instruments, from bones to accordions, is impressive, as are the individual and combined talents on display.  Ron sings a rousing song about the economic crisis and draws everyone into the chorus:

“Bugger the bankers and politicians

Bugger the bureaucrats too

Bugger the buggers that make up the rules

And if you’re one of them

Then bugger you….”

And we all feel much better for that!  The Geats are in their element!  Grendel is buggered!

This kind of evening may not be to everyone’s taste, but it is exactly what I was looking for on this occasion.  Singing by a fireside, lubricated by quaffs of local ale, the oral traditions of folk song and the rhythms of dance erasing the memories of cold and wet – Merrie England thrives!  At least for the moment…..

“The poem was over,

The poet had performed, a pleasant murmur

Started on the benches, stewards did the rounds

With wine in splendid jugs……”

In the morning we stop at Leiston Abbey, wet feet, splashed with raindrops, umbrella-ing our visit with no one in sight.  But then, touching the brick and pebble walls, passing through loops and breaks in the walls, we feel the weight of years, the strange dislocation of the abbey from below, towards the coast, in the 14^th century and then the brutal destruction by the henchmen of Henry VIII, but now we hear the tuning of instruments, the accordance of an ensemble, coming from on high within the reconstruction of the monastic buildings…..  A music school, Pro Corda, now occupies the site of the Premonstratensian Abbey, and, in a wonderful way on this grey wintry day, the sound of instrumental music issuing from a high window in a ruined abbey ties these chords together, as we link up the burial at Sutton Hoo, with the music at the Eel’s Foot Inn, with the idea of Merrie England. 

As we leave we look back, then turn once again to the future. The year ends and another begins.  “Fortune, good night.  Smile once more.  Turn thy wheel.”

 

With thanks to Seamus Heaney for the quotations from "Beowulf"

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/sutton-hoo/


http://www.theeelsfootinn.co.uk/index.php

http://www.rspb.org.uk/reserves/guide/m/minsmere/
http://www.procorda.com/index.php?pid=44&p=About_Us