Buried groups of coins and precious metal, hidden for safekeeping and never reclaimed.
In 1942 a ploughman at West Row in Suffolk struck a hoard of 34 pieces of late Roman silver tableware. His employer took it home and kept quiet about it for four years before the world found out.
In 1840 workmen repairing a riverbank near Preston dug into a lead chest packed with about 40 kilograms of Viking silver: thousands of coins and more than a thousand ingots, arm-rings and pieces of hacksilver.
Over more than 40 years, ploughing and metal detecting at Ken Hill near Snettisham in Norfolk turned up at least 14 hoards of Iron Age gold and silver, among them the Great Torc, a masterpiece of Celtic art.
On 6 January 2007 a father and son detecting near Harrogate found a Viking hoard of 617 silver coins and gold and silver jewellery, packed into a gilded cup made in the Frankish empire. It was valued at £1,082,000.
In 2014 a metal detectorist in Dumfries and Galloway found more than 100 objects of silver, gold and rare materials, buried in carefully wrapped parcels around AD 900. It was valued at £1.98 million.
A couple digging for fishing worms behind the outside toilet of their rented summer cottage near Stockholm found Sweden's largest coin hoard: more than 24,000 silver coins. The state has paid them 4 million kronor.
A newcomer to detecting found 268 Roman silver denarii on Herefordshire farmland in 2019. Six years on, the hoard has come home and is on free public display in Leominster.
In 2009 a Staffordshire detectorist found the first pieces of what is still the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever discovered: almost 4,000 objects and fragments, most of them fittings from weapons.
