Buried groups of coins and precious metal, hidden for safekeeping and never reclaimed.
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.
More than 5,000 silver pennies of Æthelred II and Cnut, buried in a lead parcel around 1035 and found at a detecting club rally near Buckingham in 2014. Valued at £1.35 million, the hoard is now in Aylesbury.
A detector survey ahead of a military expansion on Gotland has found 45 Roman silver coins and a gold ring, buried at an ancient farm around AD 450.
Two hikers in north-east Czechia found 598 gold coins and a box of jewellery hidden in an old field wall, and handed everything to the regional museum the same day.
In 1992 a farmer lost a hammer and asked a friend with a metal detector to find it. He found the Hoxne Hoard instead: nearly 15,000 Roman coins and 200 pieces of gold and silver, now in the British Museum.
Two detectorists in Østerdalen found Norway's largest Viking Age coin hoard in April 2026. After the harvest, the search resumed, and the count has now passed 5,000 coins.
