Sutton Hoo

Not a hoard but a king’s ship-grave, and one of the greatest archaeological finds in Europe. In 1939, on the eve of war, a landowner asked an excavator to dig the largest of the mounds on her Suffolk estate, and under it lay the ghost of an 88-foot ship and the burial of an Anglo-Saxon king, his iron helmet, gold shoulder-clasps and a purse of coins intact, from around AD 625. The acid soil had eaten the body and the timber but left their shapes in the sand. It gave a face to the “Dark Ages.” PUBLIC (National Trust), Suffolk.