The Broighter hoard - a question of ownership

R Warner

The Broighter hoard – a question of ownership

in O’Br ien, G. (ed), Derry & Londonderry: History and Society (Dublin; Geography Publications, 1999), 69-

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HE BROIGHTER HOARD - A QUESTION'F OWNERSHIP

en Thomas Nicholl's plough juddered in its furrow in 1896 it set in'n a story as bizarre as any Irish mythological tale. 1 Joseph Gibson'sd ploughman, James Morrow, was in the lead, ploughing the heavyt soil to about six inches' depth. NicholPwas following in the sameow with an American plough, subs oiling to ~bout fifteen inches',th. Because he was walking behind the plough he noticed that a:ment of metal had been brought to the surface.3He turned backfound, in a space of about nine inc~es square, the other objects

~now constitute. the Broighte~ hoard, which he collected and took{ash under an outside tap.4 The place of the discovery was a field

,ide Gibson's farmhouse of Broighter, in the townland of the samele, between the river Roe and Lough Foyle - low, flat, heavy landT' about .two kilo1J1etresinland from the lough but once on the very-eitself.5 \.

ibson (plate 3.1) bought the objects, for £5, from Nicholl, then soldl to an acquaintance, a well-known dealer in antiquities from

flty Cork, Robert Day. Day had them straightened and mended byDublin jewellers Messrs. Johnson - a better fate than often befellent gold in the nineteenth century. He then sent them to Londonlisplay at the Society of Antiquaries' rooms and they were brieflytioned in the Athenaeum.6 It was apparently at this stage that theI Irish Academy, at that time playing a very active role in the~ctionof Ireland's material cultural heritage, for the first time heard.e Broighter gold objects. The' couficil of the Academy decided to1the objects and asked the lord lieutenant to pursue the case, but

trustees of the British Museum were too quick and purchased thects from Day for £600. Virtually all the fine gold and silveruities that now form the core of the collection of the National

,um of Ireland had been rescued for the nation by the Academy,he Broighter Hoard had got away. In 1897 the archaeologist Arthur

hs, of Knossos fame, published an excellent description and inter-tation of the Broighter gold in the prestigious journal Archaeologia/

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Mr Joseph Laughlin Gibson of Broighter.

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THE BROIGHTER HOARD - A QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP

rprisingly mentioning neither the place (other than vaguely to theoast of the 'Northwest of Ireland') nor the circumstances of itsliscovery. It is difficult to believe that Evans was unaware of the;r-ecisefind-spot so we may assume that the British Museum wished to~~pit quiet.'The Academy found it unacceptable that the objects should have left

ie country without the normal benefit of a treasure trove inquest.ley were the crown agents for Ireland in the matter of treasure trove,

ut they were advised that the British Museum could not, except by: of Parliament, alienate' its collections. It was to the Westminster

fliament, . then, that the Irish authorities, through the Irish member,fun Redmond, quite properly addressed their concern.8 A royalfunussion was set up late in 1898 as a result of this intercession, to.

ise on the relationship between the National Museums in London,dinburgh and Dublin. The commission suggested that in certainffumstances, such as pertained in this case, national interest should..vail and advised that the Broighter objects be 'returned on loan to

,lin. The trustees of the British Museum refused to part with them,'in 1903 were taken to court by the attorney-general on behalf ofcrown in whom. treasure trove is vested, who claimed that they had"uired the artefacts unlawfully.'le 'law' of treasure trove is complex and inconsistently applied but

~pproximately as follows.9 If a newly unearthed object of gold orliY~ris thought to have been abandoned by its last owner - that isIfnwn away' or ritQally deposited - it is declared not to be treasure

'e and is deemed to belong to the landowner. ID If the inference is'the object was buried with the intention of recovery (animus'rtendi) - for instance if it was hidden in a time of danger and theLerwas killed before i~could be recovered - and if no next-of-kin

.~be identified it is declared to be treasure trove. The crown takes

:session of it and the finder receives an ex gratia reward. treasure(C? was, of course, originally a device for filling the royal coffers but].gthe last couple of centuries a fair amount of antiquarian gold. silver has been saved from dispersal or destruction by its use. The

~iq.enceupon which the decision, for or against treasure trove is madeJil;l,~uallyheard by a coroner, but a higher court can be called upon.i~difficulty with the 'law' of treasure trove is that the intention of the

on who originally parted with the object is often extremelyisult, sometimes even impossible, for an archaeologist to ascertain.flone for a coroner or judge who may be hearing conflicting expert

s.

le Academy and the British Museum, in order to prepare theirS, sent teams of experts to Broighter to explore the context of the

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find. During this work many large holes were dug - indeed much ofthe field was dug over. This was not helped by the fact that hoards oftreasure hunters had also been digging around the Gibsons' farm.Before th.e case came to court both Joseph Gibson, the landowner andJames Morrow, the head ploughman died, but what little they knew ofthe circumstances of the find had undoubtedly been elicited from themby the experts, who also questioned Nicholl thoroughly. Mr Nichollhad found seven substantial artefactsll and a number of smaller ones,all made of gold. There was a fine collar of tubular golcl, highlyd~corated with raised scrolls' and pellets; one and a bit torcs ofentwined gold bars with hook-and-loop terminals; two necklets ofloop-in-loop gold wire with complex slider-clasps; a gold bowl and agold model boat with seats, oars, mast and other fittings (plate 3.2).When Mr Nicholl found them they were badly crumpled but they were.straightened and mended in Dublin, without, we hope, undue change..His wife later said that some small objects might have washed downjthe drain while he washed them under the yard tap.12If so, given thlheavy nature of gold, they are possibly still in the drain. Except for ;

fragment of the boat found later by' Nicholl,- despite the extensiv\digging by the exploratory teams, no other pieccis of th-e.hoard haV\been found at the site, as far as we are aware. We might assume that'anything substantial remained at the spot it would have been foun<although I must admit to a slight doubt on this score. The excavatiorwere extremely rough - shovels were the order of the day - and ¥lerlundertaken in the worst possible soil and weather conditions. The cla~at Broighter is always heavy and when wet it is quite appalling.

Justice Farwell heard the evidence at the Royal Courts of Justice itLondon in 1903.13Nicholl went to London to give evidence, and th(eminent English classical historian J. Myres acted as his interpreter! SiEdward Carson, the Irish solicitor-general, later to be a leadin~instrument in the partition of Ireland, was a member of the counsel fathe crown. The crown's chief claim was that the gold was treasurttrove. Should the crown fail to prove this to Farwell's satisfaction, thEBritish Museum would be perfectly within its legal - if not its moral 1I

right to retain ownership. The British Museum-entered what is know~in legal parlance as a 'rolled-up plea': that the gold was not treasur1trove, but that if it was treasure trove the right to receive such in th~Broighter area had been transferred by Charles II to the Irish Society'who had passed'it to the Fishmongers' Company who were ready t~assign it in this case to the British Museum trustees. Farwell dismisse(this secondary argument on the grounds that treasure trove could nObe given away with other rights and prerogatives. To argue theiprimary case that the gold was not treasure trove the British Museu

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fielded an expert team that included Evans and Myres. Theymaintained that the area was, at the time of deposition (which theysurmised! correctly as it happens, to have been around the time ofChrist), under the sea, and that as the objects could not have beenburied with a view to recovery they must- have been a ritual offering,dropped from a boat, to an Irish sea-god. The Academy team (plate3.3), which included the able polymath Praeger, the archaeologistsCoffey and Munroe and the eminent geologist Cole, was armed withthe evidence on ancient sea-levels obtained from observations and

measurements at sand-hill habitations on the north coast. They arguedcogently (and correctly) that the land was not undersea at that time.They believed that the hoard had not been abandoned by its ownerbut had been hidden for safekeeping. Interestingly they also added arolled-up defence to the effect that were it found by the court to be avotive offering there was a new owner - the god - and therefore it hadstill not been abandoned. Farwell summarily dismissed this secondary'safety net' argument - the god having failed to lay claim to hisownership!

Justice Farwell was a man of h~s time - a late~Victorian rationalist.His patience had been severely stretched by all the talk of gods andritual, and he was unimpressed by the British Museum's case which ~

he likened to the 'poem of a Celtic bard'. He unsurprisingly favouredthe scientific evidence of the Academy team and drew, in his words,..

the 'commonplace but natural inference that these articles were... ,'.

hidden for safety in a land disturbed by frequent rai~s'.14 As a result, ..

he declared the objects to be treasure trove and the king, Edward Vll, ~'ordered their return to Ireland. Both parties in the dispute were, aswe shall see, partly correct although the British Museum was far:Hnearer to the truth. Farwell, while acknowledging that the British "j,

Museum witnesses did not invent their evidence, opined that they'were little short of extravagant' in expecting the court to accept it.15,~Praeger was quite immodest in victory and boasted in all his accounts :1

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about how the scientific method of the Academy had defeated the -old-fashioned archaeology of the British Museum. He even arrogantly,!suggested that the, in his opinion, insupportable nonsense pro- !ii

pounded by the Museum had wasted everyone's time and served,merely to provide entertainment.16Ironically, had Justice Farwell had ~

the benefit of our present knowledge (or perhaps had he, been more .,romantic) he would have found the hoard not to be treasure trove, ::and it would now be in London!

A question of authenticityIn 1937 Joseph Raftery, the keeper of Irish Antiquities in the National

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Plate 3.3 Exploration at Broighter by experts from the Royal Irish Academy. From left to right, Grenville Cole (Professor of Geology at theRoyal College of Science), R. 1. Praeger. (see text), George Coffey (Curator of the Collection of the Royal Irish Academy), anunidentified gentleman (probably not J. Gibson), a farm-labourer (Tom Nicholl?), two boys (probably Gibson's son and Nicholl'sbrother). Photo taken in 1901/2 by R.J. Welch.

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Museum and Ireland's leading Iron Age expert, was quoted as being ofthe opinion that

... recent investigation has shown that the greater part of theobjects of the Broighter hoard] is Indian. Only the wonderfully 1decorated collar and the two torques. are Irish.17

A short time later Praeger wrote cryptically of the Broighter hoard,'There is a sequel to the story, but it cannot be told yet.'18The art-historian Fran<;;:oiseHenry followed this in 1940 with

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The so-called 'Broighter hoard' having been found inside an oldumbrella lying in a ditch is hardly likely to be a deposit of theIron Age. But whatever the real origin of the other miscellaneousgold objects, there is little doubt that tJ1egold torque comes fromNorthern Ireland.19

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The coup de grace was dealt to the hoard by Adolf Mahr, director of

the National Museum, in 1941 with the 'following ~tatement:

... the Broighter ... 'hoard' .. must be struck off the list almostcompletely as a discovery illustrating La Tene Art in Ireland. Thisis not the place to enter into a full statement of facts which havecome to light quite recently and which, moreover, the writer i~ notat liberty to divulge, as far as names and circumstances areconcerned. The facts which are now stated must be taken at facevalue, and the responsibility for setting them out here restsentirely with the present writer. It can be taken for granted,however, that the Broighter find is an exploded myth. The objectswere found together, it is true, but they constitute a nineteenthcentury 'hoard', not a votive offering or a hoard of the firstcentury AD. Of the objects H. the gold torque is certainly, oralmost certainly, an Irish object and the chances are that it hadbeen found originally somewhere ip.the vicinity. The golden neckrings and chains, probably also the gold cup, are of Oriental,probably Indian, workmanship. As to the gold boat, whilst anIrish origin is not impossible, the odds are that it too came thitherwith the other foreign objects.2o

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In 1942 Praeger leapt to the defence of the hoard,21pointing out thathe had questioned Nicholl closely around 1902, that it was clear that nocontainer or wrapper had been found and that the hoard had beendiscovered near the slight groove which marked the line of an old

THE BROIGHTER HOARD - A QUESTION OF O\'I(7NERSHIP

ditch that had been removed by Gibson's father many years

previously,22but not in it. Unfortunately he weakened his argument byaccepting the claim of the disparate dates of the component objects

~'~;.i,;,,"alldtherefore harking back, in effect, to Cochrane's and Farwell'sr;~51udicrous suggestion that the date of the deposition was the Viking

e;a.23 For the final edition of his Archaeology of Ireland, R.A.S.Macalister had armed himself with a detailed, apparently verbatim

cteport of the court case and further gossip that he had picked up~relating to the 'umbrella', and had read and digested (as apparentlyFraeger, J. Raftery and Mahr had not) Evans's original article describing

~§and dating the objects. He laid into those who were spreading theJ!if'iInsubstantiated rumour and attempted to reinstate the integrity of the

hoard.24It is a sad reflection on the tenacity of gossip that as late as1965Henry could still claim that 'The so-called "Broighter hoard" was a

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.~'llectionof miscellaneous objects which probably came from a private,~Ollection'25and in 1970 the Celticist Vincent Megaw could refer, in his

ajor review of European Celtic art, to 'This... great torc found underri old umbrella'.26What was the source of these devastating 'facts' that could only be

ifitnted at by those in the know? We can thank the Iron Age authority, ". ~

. 1J1' Raftery for recently publishing a document that tells all.27AIblin stockbroker, Mr J. Hamill, was, as a young man, a friend and

istant relative of the Broighter landowner Gibson and of the family.:e'often walked tlJ.eland in Gibson's company, particularly around theC[teof the discoVery. Many years after Gibson's death, Mrs Gibsonowed Hamill a paper package in a drawer in her bedroom. Hamill

escribed the contents thus: he saw

a portion about 3" long, of that part of the ribs where they wereattached to the collar through which a rather thick wooden shafthad passed. No portion of this shaft remained and what was leftof the ribs was badly rusted, but there was sufficient to show thatit was the remains of an old umbrella.28

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Mrs Gibson told Hamill that the 'umbrella' had been found at the

,~imeof discovery and at the same spot, and that she had hidden itih~,causeshe feared that they might be accused of having obtained the"lOneyfor the objects by false pretences. She said that she had a vague

.~' recollection of having been told of a robbery that had taken place at a~4rby house whose occupants had travelled the world. Hamill recordsat he related the story to a Dublin friend and it was from this person

eclatthe staff of the National Museum heard it. Hamill was persuaded torp-tedown these reminiscences in the form of an affidavit in 1954 by

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which time, he tells us, the 'umbrella' had been thrown away.Macalister heard in the Limavady district, in the 1940s, the extraordinaryembellishment that the mythical 'burglars' had wrapped the spoil in theumbrella and hidden this loot in the ditch which was later levelled. Of

such stuff is history made!

Integrity is regained 1;;

It may be said, without any hesitation, that while an umbrella may well 'Ihave been found in the field it has absolutely no relevance to the IBroighter objects. The discovery of a rusty old umbrella (if such it was) !in plough soil in 1896 should occasion' us no surprise - plough soil is o.full of modern rubbish spread with the manure. The whole story of ~burglars and wrapped-up loot is a complete nonsense. Nicholl madeno mention of an umbrella either in his evidence or later and the find-

spot of the hoard was not in the ditch. The 9bjects are all of a singledate; are (as we shall see) of the same sort of gold and none areIndian. No-one had ever reported the possession of these, or similarobjects before 1896 nor was any loss or theft of antiquities of note everrecorded in the area. We should, however, be supprised and concerned~at the panic of the scholars and the speed with which so many of them,dismissed the hoard. We may, in fact" think ourselves fortunate that thehoard survived the low ebb in its reputation during the war years for atlthat time another gold hoard in the National Museum that was then 1believed to be (and we now know 'certainly was) a fake, was n'telteddown. 29

In the 1970s and 1980s the Broighter objects, and their context, were -"1

subjected to rigorous study by a new generation of archaeologists,30which has shown how thorough and percipient was Evans's paper of~i1897. The most spectacular object in the hoard is the highly decorated'4tubular collar (plate 3.4). Collars of various forms, especially thepenannular variety with buffer-shaped terminals, were a typical"ornament of the Continental Celts. These neck ornaments are shown i

on Celtic statuary and art, and have been found in graves, ritUat=

deposits and hoards. They are often referred to as torcs or torques -:~though this term should strictly be used only of the twisted forms - and::were usually made of gold or bronze. The thick tubular collar belongs~to an uncommon variety that is relatively widely distributed on thEcontinent in the lands of the Celts, apd in Southern Britain, and hat

been argued to have been specifically for ritual use, to be worn as itswere by a god.31As a number of continental and British examples hav£t~been found with Celtic coins we have a secure date for this kind qj

collar: the earlier part of the first century BC, before Caesar's invasio!1of Gaul in the middle of the century.'

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DERRY - HISTORY AND SOCIETY 1The greater part of the art on the collar was apparently produced by ~

beating the thin gold from the front after it had been formed into a ,tube, when it was full of some solid material, such as pitch. It is one of 1

the finest examples of Iron Age art in Ireland - indeed as fine as 4

anything in western Europe. It consists of what appears to be an ,tabstract, though more-or-Iess symmetrical, flowing geometric pattern!formed of three-dimensional ribs, 'lentoid' bosses and 'snail-shell' coils. ~It belongs, as one might have expected, to the general milieu of Celtic Iart of the continent and of Britain - the sort of art with which Celtic .1

objects there are often decorated. But the important thing is that it is, as~]we see from the distribution of other objects decorated with the same ,;.~

style, an Irish variant of this art - we call it Irish boss style - which was ~derived from Celtic art via Britain. Therefore the collar, though of a .iItype that would be quite at home on the continent or in southernBritain in the possession of a Celt, was certainly made in Ireland andwas decorated in a local style derived ultimately from that samecontinental homeland. Interestingly we find that the find-spots of thosecontemporary objects, bronze and stol1e, whose decoration is closest tothat of the Broighter collar are in the north-east Rart of Ireland, east of -,~0the Bann, and it is my belief that the collar was"made ,somewhere inthe north of county Antrim.

Only some of the other objects in' the hoard are in accord with the1icollar, in the sense of sharing its ultimate background. The twisted bar,torcs, which have a hook-and-Ioop fastening, are somewhat simil~r to,though simpler than a double-looped British style of torc of the same:"date and background as the tubular collars: examples of these types - .~

looped and tubular - were found together in a number of deposits at ..

Snettisham in NorfdlkY The Broighter bar torcs may be an Irish version' .~

of the more complex British torcs, in which case their cultural origin (.

and date are virtually the same as those of the cpllar. Another exampleformed part of the collection of gold ornaments found at the prehistoric,passage tomb of Newgrange, county Meath.33The loop-in-Ioop neckletson the other hand are decidedly not Celtic. Their background is, asEvans first pointed out,34the Mediterranean, or more precisely RomanEgypt, although they might have been made anywhere in the Romanworld. Their date, however, is completely in accord with the date aLlthe collar and torcs - the first century BC. The boat and the bowl,>ri

however interesting they may be in themsely-es, do not supply us with "

cultural or chronological information, for t~ey are unique. The b?wl.jwould seem to be a model cauldron, mtended for suspenslOnJAlthough Iron Age cauldrons are known from the north of Ireland, thissimple model does not match any known examples here, or elsewhere.The boat (plate 3.5) has been compared to 'Celtic' sea-going wooden;'! t

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ats of the type believed to have been used by the Veneti of Brittany,t opinion now favo1.!rs identification as a skin-covered craft, arrach, which might have been Irish (again Evans was first with thegestion).35 The boat represented would ~ave been huge for such aft, at least 20 metres (65 feet) in length, with nine rows of benchesd eighteen oarsmen, and a steering oar. It was square-rigged with aLltralmast and had a pointed stern and bow.36 Whether we should

~Jpret it as a warship or a merchant ship is unclear.'he hoard is, then, rather an eclectic one. Its constituents have beenwn, in inspiration at least, from the Celtic and Roman worldslough the major item, and perhaps two more pieces, were made in,and by a craftsman, or craftsmen, who were consciously making1 versions of Celtic pieces. While we may recognise portions of our~rd as Celtic in their inspiration we should not refer to it as a Celticard or assume that Celts deposited it. All except this and one other of. Irish Iron Age gold collars and torques are of a' non-Celtic form. We.still rather ignorant of the full cultural make-up of all our Iron Age

.~ple although we believe them to have been a mixture of aborigines. intruders - the latter including Celtic aristocrats, warriors and':smen.37We may reasonably assume that the 'Celtic' objects in thisid were made in the workshop of one of these Celtic aristocrats.gold of which all the objects are made, including the Roman ones,e same i~ its chemical constitution. The objects are about 70 per

t.gold (that is ab'Qut 17 carats), with a high silver content of arounder cent. This gold/silver alloy ('electrum') contains some 4 per cent)er and 0.2 per cent tin and, significantly, most of the objects

tain a trace of platinum. This alloy - Hartmann calls it 'PC gold' - ise unlike the gold of the earlier Bronze Age ornaments but is the.e as that of most Iron Age artefacts from Ireland (the twisted ribbons, for instance) and also of many continental Celtic ornaments.38 Wet conclude that the raw material for these, and other Irish Iron Agea ornaments, was imported, possibly from Egypt, which isesting when we consider the origin of the loop-in-Ioop necklets inhoard. Indeed the person who ma~e the collar seems to have gotidea of the little pellets on the terminal from the larger necklet. It isf, from the stylistic analysis as well as from the analysis of the goldtent, that all the objects in the Broighter hoard are chronologically

culturally compatible. No question mark remains over theirenticity, nor over the integrity of their find-spot.

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lYwas the hoard at Broighter?holl was subs oiling with a new 'American' plough - perhaps for the

time. Morrow's plough broke the surface to seven inches or so -

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he normal depth ~ and Nicholl's plough then broke into the virgin soilmd clay down to fifteen inches. It seems to me to be a very reasonableinference that the objects had lain at that previously untouched depth. etWeen seven and fifteen inches, perhaps on the underlying clay.

icholl claimed that the objects had been in a tight bunch; he found(em in a space nine inches square. So close were they that all hadowe to the surface together, only- a single object being displaced bye plough from the bunch. The small boat-fixtures were within theulIlpled boat and tne two loop-in-Ioop chains 'inside' (whatever thateans) the collar.39There can therefore be no doubt whatsoever thate;objects represented a single deposit - a hoard. Interestingly, Nicholllueh later told how there seemed to be a sort of sticky dark substance

Ilmd them, which Neill has suggested might have been the remainsm organic container.4oThe collar is missing both an inset from one1$buffer terminals and the fixture that held its two halves together:he back, and o~y half of one of the bar torcs survives. As it seemslikely that these were lost during the sojourn. of the objects in the)Jmd, or since their recovery, we may fairly assume that the objectsre in this state when deposited.'t.was the contention of the archaeologists sent to Broighter by the': ~

demy at the turn of the cen~ury that the land of the Broighter levelsnot, at the time of the deposition of the hoard, under the sea. They

e strictly right, in the sense that the land at Broighter was, under,al conditions, three or four metres above sea-level (about theas today). But they failed to understand the nature of this low,

;round, and the importance of its location between Lough Foylehe river RoeY The present shore-line of the lough is a couple ofletres from Broighter and the 'reclaimed' land is now protected by:e. The ancient slfore-line, however, can be traced as a ridge oronly a few metres'from the find.:.spot of the hoard (the element

in Broighter and in the neighbouring Broglasco and Broharris is.?tcertainly from the Irish bruachJ a bank, and probably refers tolId shore-line).4ZUnder normal conditions storm-tides would haveiJthis ground and the natural environment of the spot at which the

was found would have been salt-marsh (this is the meaning of

~!ace-name MyroeJ adjoining Broighter). Lough Foyle has a large!ment and surface-area, but a restricted exit. In the rightplstances of wind and tide, and rain in the mountains, the water-~Ji'notonly rises considerably but resonates, creating huge local

. On these occasions the river Roe, increased by water from thetains and blocked by the risen lough, can flood disastrously.:'are recent records of floods many metres deep). The Roe runswards parallel to the lough shore before turning west to enter the

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ugh. BetWeen it and the lough (and Broighter) is a low ridge,:obablya glacial esker. At Myroe, just east of Broighter, is a breach inis ridge through which the flood-water would naturally rush, passing'er the site of the hoard and entering the lough. At Broighter the old

re-line is indented by a series of channels which were probably'med by this oft-repeated flood. So to say that Broighter was notder water in normal conditions is not at all the same as saying that it; dry land.hese considerations are important in our quest to explain thesons behind the deposition of the hoard. The greatest of the

mparable British treasures, the series of hoards from Snettisham, are1d by their excavator to have had a non-ritual origin. He believes43t they were buried for safety, as was argued for Broighter by theIy,rn.Snettisham and Broighter have several things in common: the"lllar collars; the fragmentary or cut nature of some objects; theltly bunched character of the hoard itself, with'some objects inside.ers. But Broighter, unlike Snettisham, was not, as we have seen,rctlydry ground. It is exceedingly unlikely that habitation could have~ppresent here or that normal activities were possible in the vicinity.rtal of the objects for safety in such a place, with a view to their~ntualrecovery, seems implausible.'hese same arguments might seem to tell against a ritual depositionBroighter also, were it not that many other finds of Iron Age objects[[eland and elsewpere have come from riverine or marshy contextsiich can only be explained, as ritual. Indeed another fine object:orated in the general style of the collar was found in an very similartext, for the ritual(?) bronze object known as the 'Cork Horns' waslid in the mud of Cork Harbour.44It is, then, not at all unlikely thatobjects were placed in this inhospitable spot for ritual purposes. Itven possible that they were dropped here from a boat during are flood. There is a record of an anchor having been unearthed at

roe.45There is, however, an alternative explanation which derivesthe observation that the find-spot seems to be on the route of the

;tulated Roe loadwater run-off., It is that the hoard, within someanic container, was washed into the Roe, or had been intentionallyced in the Roe, during a severe flood, and was further washed onto

spot by the overspill. Of course we have no way of deciding"een these alternatives, but we can regard as virtually certain the

othesis that the hoard was ritually deposited in water or wetundo We may draw the further conclusion that the purpose of thisosition was to placate whatever god was responsible for the.ding of the land or for the rough sea, or was capable of mitigatinge problems.

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Once we accept the probability that the hoard was a ritual offering

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to a sea-god much comes into focus. For a start the presence within the "./',1'

hoard of the model boat makes sense, as do the non-Irish elements It'(the loop-in-Ioop necklets). We might suppose that merchants were !,

foremost among those for whom appeas~ment of the a sea-god wasnecessary. In early Irish mythology the chief god associated with thesea was Manannan mac Lir- Manannan 'son of the sea' - an Irish (notnecessarily Celtic) equivalent of the Roman Neptune and the Greek'Poseidon. In 1981 I thought I was the first to suggest that he was thegod for whom the hoard was intended.46 In fact this god was first"~posited by a certain 1. Horton-Smith, a 'friend of the court' in 1903 in .'. ~

reply to Farwell's query as to whether there was such a thmg as an "

Irish sea-godY Manannan was the chief pagan Irish god of the

underworld, of water, and of crops, and is supposed to have possessed '~a huge cauldron - which brings the model cauldron in the hoard to .~~

mind. He was thought by the later Christian Irish monks who wrote )'!down the old pagan tales to have been an ancient merchant who livedj ~

on the Isle of Man. I am, of course, quite aware that to call into th~ .

equation a god whose name is not directly attested before the eight' ,"-

century to explain a hoard of at least eight centuries earlier requirest\more justification than the presence of the cauldron. I am acutelyf:'f1jconscious of the suspicion which now attaches to claims of an' ancientbasis to the Christian 'pagan' tales. But the name of Manannan is not

late fabrication for its root is found in the names of the islands otManfJIand Anglesea as early as the second century AD.~p

We may, however, adduce far more striking evidence to support thclaim. I have said, that Lough Foyle and the Roe were particularlsusceptible to extreme weather conditions. This of course might havlmade the lough rather dangerous for merchants. Unfortunately we havlnot the slightest evidence that merchants even used Lough Foyle in thIron Age. The distribution of Iron Age metalwork of the cultural an(artistic milieu of the Broighter collar does not suggest that the no

iwest, or the area west of the Bann, was very important. 4$ AdmittedlDonegal has produced an unexpectedly high proportion of the IrisIron Age gold ornaments that we call ribbon torcs, but these do nOhave a Lough Foyle focus and the explanation of their north-westertlconcentration eludes us. So we cannot call upon a demonstrabl~,1.I

importance of the Foyle area to the Iron Age people to explain thdeposition. It seems more likely that the strange property of the lougto rise up made it something of a barometer of marine conditions,rather of the temper of the sea-god. One might even believe that thIron Age people supposed that the sea-god resided in that lough an1

made his presence particularly clear there. By happy chance we fin

DERRY- HISTORYAND SOCIETY

86

TIfE BROIGHTER HOARD - A QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP

e old Irish traditions and literature referring to Manannan mac Lir,\t he did indeed have his underwater habitation in Lough Foyle.49In,riessuch as Tbe Voyage of Bran it is made quite dear that his palaces in that lough. The waves of the lough were his horses, the spray

~1r manes. I described the decoration on the tubular collar' as

~p~rendy purely abstract, but I think this is to fail to appreciate thebdety of Celtic art in which representations, for instance of heads,in be hidden to emerge unexpectedly to the observer. In a way this is

same subdety shown by the waves, Manannan's sea-horses -

p~aring and disappearing. When we look at the art of the collar witheye attuned to this 'Celtic' subtlety we see that the motif appears to

\resent a legless horse with a flowing mane. It is, I believe, theifnbolic image of Manannan, or at least of a sea-god, and proof that

,~,'Collarwas made for, and the hoard was deposited to placate, suchod.!fheBroighter hoard has had a chequered history but now seems not:t secure, but capable of providing a huge amount of cultural6rmation. Much of the interpretation presented here, is speculative'~:'itis to be hoped that future work on the hoard, the find-spot and

ultures that make up our Iron Age will eventually cast more light's spectacular but enigmatic find.

owledgementsJp. grateful>to Mrs. Elizabeth Rea, granddaughter of ]oseph Gibson, for help in'" ,'rltifyingthe local p€ople in plate 3.3 and for supplying plate 3.1. Copyright is aslows:plate 3.1 Mrs. Rea, plates 3.3 and 3.6 the Trustees of the Ulster Museum andjes 3.2, 3.4 and 3.5 the National Museum of Ireland.

ferencesThere is some confusion and disagreement in the various published summariesof the discovery and of the subsequent events. The court case of 1903 waspublished in Law Reports - Supreme Court of Judicature, Chancery Division,1903, v.2 (London, 1903), pp 598-614, hereafter cited as Law Reports. Althoughthe judge's summary and some of the counsels' evidence is therein given in fullthe evidence taken from witnesses, including Nicholl, is only very brieflysummarised. Nevertheless this must be regarded as a primary source. R. L.Praeger spoke soon after the discovery with Nicholl and was present at the courtcase. His accounts must also be regarded as primary: they are 'A historic trial: theLimavady gold ornaments case' in Proc. Belfast Nat. Hist. & Phil. Soc. 1902-4,pp 50-52, The way that I went (Dublin and London, 1939 edition) pp 63-67 and'The Broighter gold ornaments' in R.5.A.!., In. 72 (1942), pp 29-32. These arehereafter cited respectively as Praeger, Trial, Way and Broighter. Another usefulprimary account of the circumstances of the find, obtained very soon after thediscoveryfrom the parties themselves, was written by Robert Cochrane - 'OnBroighter, Limavady, County Londonderry, and on the fmd of gold ornaments

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there in 1896' in R.sA.!., In. 32 (1902), pp 212-224. E. C. R. Armstrong publisheda quite lengthy account in the Catalogue of Irish gold ornaments in the collectionof the Royal Irish Academy (Dublin, 1920), pp 24-29, but it is secondary andsome errors have crept in. In 1949 R. A. S. Macalister, who had obtained a fulltranscript of the court case (fuller than I:aw Reports), corrected Armstrong andexpanded upon the earlier accounts. His account in The archaeology of Ireland,2nd edition (London, 1949), at pp 237-41 is an extremely reliable and usefulsecondary discussion. Later secondary summaries include those of PeterHarbison, who gives extra information on the political background in his TheArchaeology of Ireland (London, 1976) at pp 57-59, and Ken Neill, whopublished statements made by Nicholl to A. McL May (contained in May's.notebooks) and by Nicholl's wife and son in 'The Broighter hoard' inArchaeology Ireland, 7.2 (1993), pp 24-26 (hereafter Neill, Broighter). These late,or reported recollections are often at odds with the earlier evidence and I thinkare sometimes unreliable. When giving the source for a statement I will cite onlythe earliest. Where no citation is given the source will be Law Reports orCochrane, Broighter.Not 'Nickle' (Cochrane, Broighter), 'Nichol' (Law Rf1p°rts)or 'Nicholls' (Praeger,Broighter).

A report (Neill, Broighter, p. 24) that one of the objects (the bowl) was transftxeon the plough coulter seems to be fanciful, possibly an embellishment by Nichoin his later years. His wife recalled that he' did not immediately realise that thewere gold Gbid). '\~Either at home (Law Reports) or under the yard tap of the farm (Neill, BroighteJp.24).

For the location see Cochrane, Broighterand R. Warner in 'The Broighter hoard ~

a reappraisal, and the iconography of the collar' in B. Scott (ed.), Studies 017~~

early Ireland: essays in honour of M. .v. Duignan (Belfast, 1981), pp 22-38t~hereafter cited as Warner, Broighter.Athenaeum, 30 Jan. (1897), p. 153.A. Evans, 'On a votive deposit of gold objects found on the north-west coast (Ireland' in Archaeologia, 55 (1897), pp 391-408, hereafter Evans, Votive.Harbison, Archaeoiogy, p. 58. .

The report on the court case (Law Reports) contains a very full summary (

treasure trove as it was interpreted at the time of the Broighter case. For a m~~recent discussion see C. Sparrow, 'Treasure trove: a lawyer's view' in Antiqui~56 (1982), pp 199-201.Sparrow, Treasure, p. 200. JNumbers 450,456,457,458,459, 575, 833 of B. Raftery, A catalogue of Irish Ir:Age antiquities (Marburg, 1983).Neill, Broighter, p. 24.Law Reports.

Ibid., pp 610-11.Ibid., p. 611.Praeger, Broighter, p. 31. ,J. Raftery, quoted verbatim by A. Mahr in 'New aspects and problems in Iriprehistory' in Prehist. Soc. Proc., 3 (1937), pp 262-436, at p. 410.Praeger, Way, p. 67, fn. 1F. Henry, Irish art in the Early Christian period (London, 1940), p. 13 fn 4. .cA. Mahr, 'The pagan background' in J. Raftery (ed), Chritian art in ancIreland, 2 (Dublin, 1941), pp 11-12.

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12.13.14.15.16.17.

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THE BROIGHTERHOARD- A QUESTIONOF OWNERSHIP

Praeger, Broighter, p. 32; Macalister, Archaeology, p. 240; This point is discussedin A. Farrell, S. Penny and E. M. Jope, 'The Broighter boat: a reassessment' inIrishArchaeological Research Forum, 2 (Belfast, 1975), pp 15-26, at p. 17.Cochrane, Broighter, p. 213.Praeger, Broighter, pp 31-2; see Cochrane, Broighter, pp 220-4 and Law Reports,p. 609. .Macalister,Archaeology, p. 239.F. Henry, Irish art in the early Christian period to 800 AD (London, 1965), p. 11,fn 2.

J. V. S. Megaw, Art of the European Iron Age (Bath, 1970), p. 114.B. Raftery,La Tene in Ireland (Marburg, 1984).

. 'J. Hamill, an Affidavit of 1954 now housed in the National Museum of Ireland.The 'Strangford hoard'; Macalister, Archaeology, p. 163.For a full discussion of the context, and a summary discussion of the objects andtheir interpretation, see Warner, Broighter. For a fuller description andconsideration of the objects see Raftery, Catalogue, and La Tene, pp 181-92. Thediscussion offered here includes a simplified summary of those sources, in whichfurther references will be found.A. Furger-Gunti, 'Der Goldfund von Saint-Louis' bei Ba-sel,und ahnliche keltischeSchatzfunde' in Zeits. fur Schweizerische archaologie und kunstgeschichte, 39(1982), pp 1-47.I. Stead, 'The Snettisham Treasure: excavations in 1990', Antiquity, 65 0991),

..,'pp 447-65.c. Topp, 'The gold ornaments reputedly found near the entrance to Newgrangein 1842' in Annual Report of Inst. of Archaeol., London, 12 0956), pp 53-62.

.~Evans, Votive,pp 4-8.T' Ibid., p. 3.": Farrell, J?oat,.S. McGrail, 'Celtic seafaring and transport' in M. Green (ed.), Tbe

Celticworld (Longon, 1995), pp 254-281, at p. 264.R. Warner, 'Cultural intrusions. in the Early Iron Age: some notes' in Emania, 9

" 0991), 44-52.A. Hartmann, Prahistonsche goldfunde aus Europa (Berlin, 1970), tables 7 and27; R. Warner, 'Irish prehistoric goldwork: a provisional analysis' inArchaeomaterials 7 (1993), pp 101-113.

, Law Reports,pp 598-9.Neill, Broighter, p. 26.Most of the statements in this section originate or are referenced in, Warner,Broighter.Dr Kay Muhr of the Place-names project in Belfast agrees with this etymology,

~' which differs from that of Cochrane, Broighter, p. 219."'1 Stead, Snettisham, pp 462-3.

M. O'Kelly, 'The Cork horns, the Petrie crown and the Bann disk' In. in CorkRist. &Archaeol. Soc., 66 (1961), pp 1-12.Warner, Broighter, p. 31.

" Ibid., p. 35.Law Reports, p. 605.Raftery, La Tene, map on p. 361.Warner, Broighter, p. 36.

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Broighter townland showing site of find (from O.S. Map 1902).

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The Broighter hoard - a question of ownership

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