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The gold cup Cliff Bradshaw found in a potato field
A retired electrician dug a crushed gold cup out of an English potato field. The museum paid £270,000, and the diggers who followed put his hole 26 feet off.
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Cliff Bradshaw's detector sounded off on November 4, 2001. He was working a freshly dug potato field at Ringlemere Farm in Kent, in the far southeast of England. Sixteen inches down sat a gold cup that a plow had crushed in. Bradshaw was a retired electrician. He told reporters he had never held that much gold in his hand. So he put it in an old ice-cream tub for safekeeping. Then the clock started. He reported it, as English law requires within 14 days. In 2002 a coroner, a local court official, ruled it Treasure. That is the legal word for old gold and silver the state gets first claim on. In June 2003, 19 months after the beep, the British Museum paid £270,000, then about $520,000. Bradshaw split the money with the Smith family, who own the farm. But a coin dealer's report said the price was low. Chris Rudd's firm valued the cup, restored, at £350,000 to £400,000. |
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The legend
Rillaton, the only other cup like it in Britain, came out of a grave in 1837.
The tale that grew up fast was a burial. Bradshaw saw that his cup looked like the Rillaton cup, found with a skeleton in Cornwall in 1837. And his cup sat on a low rise in the field that looked like a barrow, an old burial mound.
So the story became a chief in his grave with his gold beside him. Newspapers said the find rewrote history. The British Museum's director called it a birthday present for the museum's 250th year.
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The evidence
The diggers put Bradshaw's hole about 26 feet from the spot he gave.
Kent keeps a list of its old sites, the Kent Historic Environment Record. It logs the find on November 4, 2001. The depth was 16 inches, and the cup weighed 183.7 grams, or 6.5 ounces.
A Canterbury team and the British Museum dug the rise from 2002 to 2006. Bradshaw helped with his detector and a trowel, the county's dig club said.
The dig found a ring ditch about 140 feet across and a mound raised around 2000 BC. It turned up two Early Bronze Age amber pieces and almost 60 Anglo-Saxon graves. But it found no Bronze Age burial, Keith Parfitt of the dig team wrote.
Parfitt also wrote that a small, recent pit in the mound was likely Bradshaw's own hole. If so, it lay about 26 feet from his stated findspot, the place a finder reports.
The museum raised the £270,000 from three funds. They were the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund and the museum's Friends.
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What's still down there
Survey work found nine smaller ring ditches nearby, and by 2007 only three had been checked.
More gold is unlikely. The cup was not a grave good. Parfitt suggests it went into the ground with a scrap of amber as a last act, when the old site went out of use.
What is left is the rest of the site. A survey found nine smaller ring ditches, the marks of mounds plowed flat. By 2007 diggers had checked three, and one proved to be a trick of the soil. And Parfitt wrote that the Anglo-Saxon cemetery ran on past the trenches.
So our answer: the field still holds graves and post holes, and most likely no second cup. That rests on a fully dug mound with no Bronze Age burial in it.
The objection is Rillaton, which did come from a grave. Parfitt and Stuart Needham wrote in 2004 that the small rings might well hold burials.
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What's true
Eight claims. Five are documented. Three are campfire stories.
Legend
The cup came from a chief's grave.
The find rewrote history.
The cup lay where Bradshaw said.
Evidence
Found November 4, 2001, 16 inches down (Kent Historic Environment Record).
Bought for £270,000 in June 2003 (British Museum, 2003,0501.1).
The mound held no Bronze Age burial (Parfitt, Canterbury Archaeological Trust).
His likely hole lay 26 feet from his stated spot (Parfitt).
Almost 60 Anglo-Saxon graves turned up beside the mound (Parfitt).
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Where it is
Ringlemere is about 2.3 miles west of Sandwich, on private farmland.
Sandwich is an old port town in Kent, the county in the far southeast corner of England. It sits about 70 miles east of London and some 30 miles from France across the Channel. But the field is private, and there is no public site to visit.
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| London to Sandwich is about 70 miles. That is a bit more than New York to Trenton. |
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What it takes to go
In England, a Treasure find must reach the coroner within 14 days.
To see the cup, look up object 2003,0501.1 at the British Museum in London. It goes out on loan, so check before you fly.
Get the landowner's written permission first, as Bradshaw did. English law requires it. A scheduled monument is a protected old site. Detecting on one without approval is a crime.
Then know the rule he followed. Gold or silver objects over 300 years old count as Treasure, and you report them to the coroner. A panel of outside experts sets the price, and the museum pays the finder and the landowner.
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Happy Treasure Hunting!
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P.S. Parfitt wrote that Bradshaw was the first to spot the link to the Rillaton cup.
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Sources Kent Historic Environment Record MKE41636; Keith Parfitt, SERF paper, Kent County Council; Kent Archaeological Society Newsletter 53, 2002; Parfitt and Needham, PAST 46, April 2004; British Museum collection 2003,0501.1; The Guardian, June 26, 2003; BBC via Stone Pages, July 1, 2003; Country Life, July 2014; Chris Rudd Ltd; Wikipedia; photos: Wikimedia Commons
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