Treasure Donated to the Oxfordshire Museums Service

The landowner of my P and I have agreed to donate the cufflinks to the Oxfordshire Museums Service rather than to receive a reward ex gratia following the Treasure Valuation process. It would have been interesting to have the treasure valuation go forward, as I would have loved knowing from independent assessors how much the cufflinks are worth. But donating them at this stage actually magnifies the public good by saving the museum funds it would spend on the appraisal process.

As we went through the donation process, Mr B ____ and I worked with Ian Richardson, Treasure Registrar for the PAS and the British Museum. Without telling us, Ian arranged certificates of appreciation for me and Mr B ____ from the Minister of Culture and the Digital Economy. David Moon, Curator of Archaeology for the Oxfordshire Museums Service, agreed to attach Mr B ____’s name and mine to the donor card for the cufflinks and to let us know when they are displayed in local museums. The Woodstock Museum is currently being remodelled, but they anticipate establishing a gallery section focused on local metal detecting finds when they reopen.

Cufflinks Declared Treasure

This is from an article in the Oxford Times, which I happened across by accident. The last line of the piece indicates that at the Coroner’s meeting a pair of cufflinks were also declared treasure. Those are the ones I found! The landowner and I are now keen to donate them to the Oxfordshire Museum, which has declared an interest in acquiring them.

Treasure hunter finds at least £1m worth of Viking artefacts in Oxfordshire (From The Oxford Times)

On the Baltic

Gdynia, Poland, 6 February 2016

My Polish friend Ania was keen to try detecting, and as Polish antiquities laws are draconian in the extreme, I suggested a visit to the seashore. Gdynia is about five hours from Warsaw, but watching the wintry landscape flash by offered the chance to clear my head.

Once on the beach, we started to get loads of signals with the Deus’s Wet Beach programme, but most of these were bottlecaps from a who’s who of Polish beers. We did find some modern clad, and as The Hat says — quoted often here at EoW — ‘a coin is a coin’. We also found one earring with lots of plastic leaves depending from it (not a keeper).

As we searched, we noticed several mainly elderly people jumping into the Baltic. The air temp was probably zero or near that; lower with the windchill. The water can’t have been much warmer. The bathers turned out to belong to the local ‘Mors’, or Walrus, Club, what we would call polar bear swimmers in the States. Not to be outdone, I stripped off to my pants and jumped in.