43 published discoveries from England — coins, hoards, jewellery and artefacts recovered by detectorists and archaeologists.
In 1939 a self-taught archaeologist uncovered the outline of a 27-metre ship under a Suffolk burial mound, and inside it the richest Anglo-Saxon burial ever found: a helmet, gold and garnet fittings and silver from Byzantium.
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 2001 a detectorist in Kent found a crushed gold cup in a ploughed field. It was a rare Early Bronze Age cup, and the excavation that followed his report found an ancient monument hidden beneath the field.
In 1912 workmen demolishing a building in Cheapside, in the City of London, broke into a buried box holding about 500 pieces of Elizabethan and Jacobean jewellery: the stock of a 17th-century goldsmith.
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.
