First time lucky
A farmer’s son used milking buckets to
collect Britain’s biggest find of Roman silver denarii coins—which he began
uncovering after using a metal detector for the first time, an inquest heard
recently.
The huge hoard of 9,310 coins dating from
31 BC was found 10” below the surface of a field of barley stubble on 400 acre
Northbrook Farm at Shapwick, near Glastonbury, Somerset in August 1998.
Details of the nationally important find
were revealed for the first time when Somerset Coroner Michael Rose ruled at an
inquest in Taunton that the find was treasure—and belonged to the finders.
Kevin said that before he began exploring
the farmland with detectorist Martin Elliot, he had to be shown how to use the
machine. “Within three or four minutes I found a coin in a gateway,” said
Kevin, adding that just thirty minutes later, after discovering other coins
scattered in the field, they turned up a huge hoard of thousands of similar
coins just 10” under the surface.
Somerset County Museum said the discovery
of such a hoard was a “very rare occurrence” in this country. He said the
hoard had been buried beneath the floor of what subsequent surveys had
established was a previously unknown courtyard villa. “It was a fair
assumption that a person of great wealth had buried the coins,” they added.
The British Museum stated that the coins
were produced in Rome, Syria and Egypt and the find was the largest discovery of
denarii ever in Britain. The coins were buried about AD 230 and were the
equivalent of 10 years pay for a legionary soldier in the Roman army.
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