Items from the Sutton Hoo ship burial, now in the British Museum. Top: Gold garnet shoulder clasp encrusted with Sri Lankan garnets (RobRoy/Creative Commons/Wikimedia). Bottom: Gold belt buckle, weighing nearly 1 pound. All the objects shone in the sunshine as on the day they were buried. Basil Brown s diary, August of 1939.
Britain s Dark Ages may have formally ended in a field in Suffolk, England, on July 21, 1939. That s when archaeologist Peggy Piggott uncovered a tiny gold pyramid encrusted with garnets from the Sutton Hoo ship burial. Within days, the excavators had discovered a fabulous Anglo-Saxon hoard of precious metal objects. They had been buried alongside a local king, Raedwald, within a 90-foot-long ship. He died in 624 A.D., thus dating the site to nearly 1,500 years ago.
With theaters starting to reopen, the movie business started looking up. From an English-language Almodóvar movie to a new cut of a years-old superhero movie, Vulture’s film critics celebrate the great cinema hits of 2021.
The Dig: The beautiful Suffolk station house you can stay in where Netflix show was filmed
The film has got many wanting to also explore the Suffolk countryside
Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes in The Dig on Netflix (Image: Larry Horricks / Netflix)
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If you, like everyone else, fell in love with the Suffolk countryside after watching Ralph Fiennes, Carey Mulligan and Lily James in The Dig, then you ll love this cosy guest house.
Hidden treasures people found at home By Bennington Grant Robert Alexander/Getty Images
A centuries-old mystery may be solved soon, thanks to some old-time pirate booty recently unearthed by an amateur historian. Jim Bailey found the coins using a metal detector in Middletown, Rhode island.
For 400 years, historians have pondered the escape route of pirate Captain Henry Every after his capture of the Ganj-i-Sawai, a ship belonging to an Indian emperor carrying gold and silver from Mecca. The discovery of these coins hints that Every made a pitstop in America. Although Bailey originally believed the loot to be of Spanish or colonial Massachusetts origin, research revealed it was from 17th century Yemen.
The road would have carried thousands of soldiers marching between what is now Essex and Norfolk during the Roman era, and in 2004, the remains of a Roman settlement were discovered in the Suffolk village of Stoke Ash. Just a stone’s throw away from the A140 road, archaeologists John Fairclough and Mike Hardy found pottery, brooches, coins and other items that date back to the 1st century.
Roman forts
Here in Suffolk, archaeologists have also uncovered evidence of 1st century Roman forts at both Coddenham and Pakenham.
“Both are protected, on private land and only visible from the air as crop marks,” explains Faye.