The Galloway Hoard
- History Fix Podcast
- 1 day ago
- 18 min read
Episode 161: How the Discovery of Viking Era Buried Treasure Raises More Questions Than Answers
Senior Curator at National Museums Scotland, Martin Goldberg, looking at objects from the Viking age Galloway Hoard discovered in 2014. He's laid out silver bullion, silver Viking arm bands, disc brooches, beads, a golden bird shaped pin, and a pectoral cross.
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Derek McLennan is excited. His metal detector is beeping, a high pitched tone, clear and strong. He knows what that means. It’s 2014 and he’s walking the grounds, the glebelands of the Church of Scotland in Dumfries and Galloway. He begins to dig, sifting through the packed Earth, inching his way deeper and deeper. An hour passes before finally, a familiar glint in the soil, unmistakably silver. Derek carefully extracts the long narrow object. It looks like a spoon possibly. He wipes dirt from its shiny surface and carefully turns it over in his palm. There, on the other side, unmistakable, an X, a saltire cross. Stunned, Derek runs over to his companions, Rev Dr. David Bartholomew and Pastor Mike Smith who had joined him on this little treasure hunt. “Viking!” He yells as he runs, brandishing the piece of silver. Derek hasn’t found a silver spoon, he’s found something far older and much more valuable, a viking arm band. But what he doesn’t yet know is that this piece is only the beginning. Buried even deeper is more than 10 pounds of gold and silver artifacts waiting to be discovered: the Galloway Hoard. As each item is uncovered and studied, more questions emerge than answers. Who buried all this treasure? And why? Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I love a good buried treasure. I mean, who doesn’t? I’ve probably already told you guys this but, before I became a teacher, much more practical, my answer to “what do you want to be when you grow up?” was always an archaeologist. I wanted to dig up old things. I wanted to go out and find remnants of the past, these clues to the past. I love history and I love a good mystery and, to me, archaeologists are like historical detectives, piecing together clues to try to figure out the story of us, the story of what happened before, of how we got to where we are now. Of who we are now, really. Well, the story I have for you today is the stuff archaeologists and wannabe archaeologists dream about. But, in many ways the mystery of the Galloway Hoard still endures. So I’m hoping you’ll put your detective cap on with me today while we try to decipher why exactly all this valuable stuff was buried back in the year 900ish.
In the opener, I told you the story of the discovery of the Galloway Hoard by a metal detector enthusiast named Derek McLennan in 2014. This was not Derek’s first discovery. The year before, in 2013, he had discovered Scotland’s largest hoard of medieval silver coins near Twynholm. Pretty much ever since, for the better part of a year, he had been investigating this land in the county of Kirkcudbrightshire in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. The land was owned by the Church of Scotland but he had gotten permission to take his metal detector out there and walk around. He was joined by Reverend Dr. Bartholomew and Pastor Smith because they were also into metal detecting and treasure hunting and whatnot. Eventually, Derek detected and uncovered what he thought was a silver spoon at first but soon realized it was a Viking arm band because it had this saltire cross on it which is essentially just an X. After this, though, you know, the metal detector is still sounding off. There’s obviously more stuff down there. At that point they report the find to Scotland’s Treasure Trove Unit. How cool is that? Yeah I work for the Treasure Trove Unit. I just find treasure, professionally. The Treasure Trove Unit dispatches a local archaeologist named Andrew Nicholson and he, along with Derek McLennan start a full on excavation of the area where he found the arm band. They put the area, this undisclosed location, under 24 hour surveillance so no one else tries to get in there and, I love this part, apparently a local farmer stationed his biggest bull in the field to deter intruders.
They pretty quickly start finding more objects. These are historically significant but they wouldn’t have been all that valuable at the time they were buried. It was mostly silver bullion, or hack silver, which was essentially like loose change at the time, like burying a handful of coins. Cool, but, you know, not that crazy. There were more silver arm bands too but these clearly hadn’t been worn as arm bands. They had been hammered flat and more or less turned into silver bullion. Like they were being used as currency, not jewelry or whatever. Then something a bit more exciting, an early Christian silver cross. Of this Reverend Bartholomew said quote “It was tremendously exciting, especially when we noticed the silver cross lying face-downwards. It was poking out from under the pile of silver ingots and decorated arm-rings, with a finely wound silver chain still attached to it. It was a heart-stopping moment when the local archaeologist turned it over to reveal rich decoration on the other side,” end quote. If you’re watching the video version of this on either YouTube or Patreon you’re seeing pictures of all these artifacts. If not, if you’re just listening, I’ve also posted a bunch of pictures on my instagram @historyfixpodcast so you can check this stuff out there.
So they find all this stuff, silver bullion, more Viking style arm bands, this amazing cross, also some beads and other knick knacks, brooches and whatnot. But this is absolutely nothing compared to what they will find farther down. Because the metal detector is still beeping away even after they’ve removed all this. They keep digging. They get down about 2 feet and that’s where they find this silver vessel, like a cookie jar. That’s the best way I can describe it. It looks like a silver cookie jar. And it was wrapped in textile, in some woven cloth fabric. It has a lid on it, like a cookie jar, so they can’t see what’s inside, but presumably there is something inside. They remove the vessel and x-ray it back at the lab and sure enough, it’s full of more artifacts. So they carefully open it and start taking stuff out. Can you imagine? Like the most exciting unboxing ever.
Here’s what they found inside the vessel. They found a collection of Anglo-Saxon disc brooches. I’m throwing the word brooch around pretty haphazardly here. A brooch is like a pin, like you would wear on your clothing, with a needle that fastens it to your clothing. Disc brooches are circular shaped, sort of convex brooches worn during the early middle ages especially in Anglo-Saxon, Frankish, and Celtic cultures and they were often highly decorative with intricate filigree designs, somethings even inlaid with gems or colored glass. So they find a bunch of those. These don’t have gems but they are super super intricately decorated with filigree, sprially designs. Like, it’s actually kind of crazy that they could make these in the 900s. They also find an Irish silver brooch. They find some silk, some Byzantine silk which would have come from near Constantinople, now called Istanbul in modern day Turkey, which is over 2,200 miles away. This is a super rare find for the UK because they’re super wet, constantly wet weather means that organic material, fabric, silk, leather in finds like this does not typically survive. But because this was carefully packed in a silver vessel, it was preserved which is amazing. It does start to deteriorate pretty much immediately after they remove it from the vessel though, which is unfortunately expected. They also find a gold ingot and something made of gold and rock crystal that is wrapped in a cloth.
This last piece is probably the most interesting of all. It turns out to be a little rock crystal jar. This thing is gorgeous. You’re seeing it now if you’re watching the video but if not please go look at it on my instagram. It’s really stunning. It is made of gold wires, sort of woven, braided gold wires around rock crystal, like quartz, pieces of quartz. The lid of the jar is gold and there’s a little spout in the top. It’s really small but it could have once held a small amount of liquid like some kind of oil or sacred, holy water type liquid. There’s also an inscription in the gold base which translates to “Bishop Hygauld had me made.” So this is an interesting clue. This gorgeous little jar was obviously once owned by a guy named Bishop Hygauld, or rather made, commissioned by him. But here’s the thing, the jar itself, the rock crystal jar had to have been hundreds of years old already when it was buried in the year 900. It had to have been something like 600 to 700 years old already. And we know this because the technology did not exist between the years like 200, 300 and the year 900 to make a jar like this. The National Museum of Scotland where the Galloway Hoard is housed explains quote “Carved rock crystal is exceedingly rare in early medieval Britain and Ireland. Crystal of great clarity was difficult to find. The material is very hard and the expertise needed to carve rock crystal was not common in the ancient world. The workshops of Imperial Rome had the technology, but there was a lull until the later 10th century. This was when centres of production re-emerged in the Islamic Caliphate. However, the Galloway Hoard was buried in the century before the rock crystal boom in Fatimid Egypt. The ends of the protruding lobes carved all around the surface are well worn. With a material as hard as rock crystal it would take a long time or a lot of wear to abrade away these leaf-like protrusions. This suggests that the origins of this carved rock crystal are likely to be much earlier. The leaf-like protrusions around the carved surface of the rock crystal make most sense when viewed upside-down. They resemble acanthus leaves from the top of a Corinthian column, a common form of Classical architecture. Wherever the surface is unworn we can see additional details carved into the crystal, like leaf stems. Upside down, we can also see how the round top of the jar would have originally connected to a column below,” end quote. They go on but the gist here is that the rock crystal jar was likely originally the top to a mini rock crystal column made in ancient Rome. They’ve found other mini decorative crystal columns like this. We know this is something the ancient Romans were making. So it seems like this Bishop Hygauld guy got his hands on this ancient Roman mini column and had it repurposed into a jar by flipping it upside down and adding a spout. Really really cool. I mean this thing was already ancient when it was buried in 900ish.
They also found some somewhat mysterious balls of dirt in the silver vessel with all this other valuable stuff. Which is kind of strange because balls of dirt don’t seem very valuable. But, upon closer inspection they had flecks of gold and bone in them. So it’s possible that they were scraped from a shrine like a shrine to a saint where they had relics like bone and gold offerings and whatnot.
The silver vessel, the cookie jar all this was in, is itself super interesting and significant. It was maybe a few centuries old already when it was buried in the year 900. It had come from Western Asia because the silver was alloyed with copper which is something they did there and it had carvings on it, including a Zoroastrian fire-alter. Zoroastrianism is one of the oldest religions originating in Iran. So it’s believed that the silver vessel originally came from the Sasanid Empire which existed in Iran from 224 to 651 AD.
So, so far we have that upper level with mostly silver bullion, spare change, right, plus the cross. Then deeper than that we have the silver vessel, the cookie jar, full of pretty cool stuff. In a separate spot from the silver vessel they also found a wooden box which had gold in it. It had a gold ingot, a large gold ring. Not like a ring you would wear on your finger. It’s too big for that so I don’t know what it was for. And a bird shaped pin made out of gold. Once again a pin like you would wear attached to your clothing. Or, I mean, to me it kind of looks like a hair pin. And then down there in another layer they also found a leather bag. And this bag contained 15 silver ingots and 31 arm rings or arm bands. Remember Derek McLennan had found an arm ring first. There were some in the top layer. Well there are a whole bunch more in this leather bag farther down and 5 of these have inscriptions on them. They have writing on them. Now arm bands like this were typically a Viking thing. But, interestingly, the writing was not Scandinavian. It wasn’t Norse. It wasn’t Viking writing. It was Anglo-Saxon, like a form atof old English. So what did they say? Well four of them appear to have peoples names or people’s initials on them. One of them says Ecgbreht which is the Old English version of the name Eggbert. It’s identifiably a name. Another one says Ed, E.D. which is believed to be someone’s initials or short for a name like Edward or Edgar. Although ED could also be the word ead which meant riches or prosperity. Another band says T.I.L. which once again could be someone’s initials or short for a name like Tila or Tilred. But also til was a word, old English for good. The fourth arm band says B.E.R. which is not a word but could be initials or a shortened form of a name like Berwulf, Bercol, or Berric. So, two could be words, but because the other two definitely aren’t words, it kind of seems like they are all names. The fifth arm band with writing on it was the hardest to decipher. It does not appear to have a name or initials on it. I has a phrase, several words. It reads quote DIS IS IIGNA F, the letter F. This didn’t make any sense at first, and we can read Anglo-Saxon runes. It still didn’t make sense. Eventually a theory emerged as to what this might mean. DIS IS is the easiest part. It means this is. Dis was a thing well before ebonics turns out. That hasn’t changed much. The IIGNA F was the confusing part. A breakthrough came in 2025 when scholars realized the F might be interchangeable with the word feoh which meant property or wealth. Then they theorized that IIGNA, might be the Old English word higna which meant community, specifically a religious community like a church. So, if they’re right about the IIGNA F then the inscription reads “this is community wealth.” Which is very interesting.
So let’s unpack some of this before we move into the greater context of the find. We definitely have some religious, early Christian stuff in here. There’s the silver cross that was in that topmost layer they found first. That cross was really unique. It was a pectoral cross so it was meant to be worn like a necklace, hence the chain. It was super intricately decorated. The silver was carved and inlaid with gold to depict symbols of the 4 evangelists who wrote the new testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There was also an empty socket in the middle that had probably once held a gemstone of some kind that must have been removed before it was buried. Anyway, this is obviously a religious piece, a Christian artifact. We also have the rock crystal jar found inside the silver vessel with that inscription about a Bishop Hygauld. A bishop is a religious figure. We have the dirt balls with flecks of gold and bone in them which likely came from a shrine to a saint, also a religious thing. And then the word IIGNA or higna carved with DIS IS IIGNA F on that one arm band which referred to a religious community. So the Galloway Hoard has all kinds of religious, early Christian references.
Another thing I want to point out. They had stuff from really far away. The silk came from over 2,200 miles away in Constantinople. The silver vessel cookie jar thing came from Iran over 4,000 miles away. So, they’re doing some serious trading we know. It makes me wonder, you know, how long it took for those trade goods to end up in Scotland. Was it like all in one long trip or were they traded and traded and traded again and made their way there gradually. Were they brought by the Romans hundreds of years ago before the fall of Rome and their retreat from Great Britain? I don’t know, the interconnections of a world over thousands of miles where you basically had to walk everywhere you wanted to go fascinates me.
There is some major confusion with this hoard, though about whether it was actually Viking or not. You know, when Derek McLennan found that first armband, he went running to the guys who were with him out there yelling “Viking!” He thought he had found a Viking artifact, because arm bands are a Viking thing. But then, you know, when you get into the rest of it, a lot suggests that this stuff was owned by Anglo-Saxons, not Vikings. The inscriptions are written in Anglo-Saxon, old English runes, not Scandinavian. And then there’s all the religious stuff, a cross with the 4 evangelists, reference to a Bishop. Vikings were pagan in the year 900 when this stuff would have been buried. They eventually converted to Christianity a century or so later but in 900 the vast majority of Vikings were Norse pagan. They were attacking churches, monasteries. They certainly weren’t joining them. So, although the Galloway Hoard is usually referred to as a Viking hoard, it probably wasn’t actually owned by Vikings. In fact, it may have even been buried to hide it from Vikings. Archaeologists believe that that top layer they found first which was mostly just silver bullion and hack silver, like loose change, right, I mean the cross was in that layer but otherwise it wasn’t a very valuable layer, whatever gemstone had been in the cross was removed even. They believe that layer was buried as a sort of decoy so that, if anyone went digging, they would find that and be like “cool, found some bits of silver and whatnot, moving on.” And not dig any further. People would assume that that was the whole hoard without realizing that the good stuff, the valuable stuff was still buried farther down. So it was like decoy treasure, they think. So this stuff was obviously buried to keep it safe, like a safety deposit box. But then, for whatever reason, no one ever went back to reclaim it.
If I had to guess, I would say that a group of Christians, like members of a church, a religious community, a higna buried this stuff in order to hide it and protect it, likely from Vikings. Because there were clearly Vikings in the area because of the presence of the arm bands. And this makes a lot of sense based on what we know about this area, this Galloway area in Scotland at the time. In the centuries prior, this area had been part of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom called Northumbria. This is pre-Scotland, pre-England. I know I keep throwing around the term Anglo-Saxon like everyone knows what that means. Anglo Saxons came from the continent, areas like modern day Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark right after the fall of Rome in the 400s. Before this, the area that is now Great Britain was inhabited by Celtic Britons, you can think of these like Indigenous Brits. They had lived there on the British Isles for thousands of years. They were the original inhabitants, the natives of that area. During the Roman empire, the Romans started to expand into Great Britain and sort of conquer the Celts, the same story we’ll see play out in the Americas a thousand years later. But, in the 400s, the Roman Empire collapsed and the Romans withdrew from Great Britain. In their absence, the Anglo-Saxons moved from Germany and surrounding areas to Great Britain where they pushed out the remaining Celts and set up their own kingdoms of which Northumbria was one. If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, you can think of Northumbria like Winterfell, the far north of this sort of realm, this real life Westeros. And, if you’re getting my Game of Thrones reference, then you can think of Vikings kind of like white walkers, these villains, these attackers from the north and Northumbria, Winterfell is right on the northern border so it’s sort of ground zero for these attacks. No, they weren’t zombies but you know what I mean. And, if you don’t, if you have no idea what I’m talking about because you’ve never watched Game of Thrones well, you should watch it. But what I’m saying is, the Vikings came from Scandinavia, to the north and Northumbria was the northern most kingdom of this Anglo-Saxon empire in Great Britain. So when the Vikings came down to invade and pillage and whatnot, they first landed in Northumbria. Ground zero. What this meant is that Anglo-Saxons living in Northumbria were quite often attacked and robbed by Vikings. By 900, when the Galloway Hoard was most likely buried, Vikings had pretty much taken control of Northumbria and brought with them their own culture including the silver arm bands. So two distinct cultures were mixing here, they were sort of fusing together at this point, Viking Norse culture and Anglo Saxon Northumbrian culture. And we see this in the Galloway Hoard. We have the silver armbands and the silver bullion which would have been Viking, suggesting they were using Viking Scandinavian currency in Northumbria by 900. But then we have the Anglo-Saxon rune inscriptions and the Christian artifacts that would have come from Anglo-Saxons, not Vikings.
So that brings us to the question of, who owned the Galloway Hoard? Who did this stuff belong to? Who buried it? I think the evidence suggests that it was owned collectively by more than one person. We have multiple, what appear to be names and initials on the arm bands and on the rock crystal jar. We’ve got Eggbert, right. We’ve got Bishop Hygauld. And then we’ve got Ed. Don’t forget about Ed. Plus TIL and BER. We have at least 5 different people who literally wrote their names on their stuff like they were going to come back for it and reclaim it later. Also of note, the arm bands remember I said were hammered and sort of flattened and folded like they weren’t meant to be worn. It also appears as though there’s a pattern to that. Ed’s band, for example, is hammered, folded differently than TIL’s and there are other bands folded that same way without inscriptions. So it’s almost like they were hammering and folding them differently to keep track of whose was whose out of this collection of like 30 something arm bands. And then we have that inscription DIS IS IIGNA F which they think actually says dis is higna feoh or “this is community wealth or community treasure.” Community here having a religious connotation, this is a religious community because that’s what higna meant. So, I mean, honestly they couldn’t have made it any more obvious in my mind. They told us who they were, they left their names behind. And they told us that the treasure belonged collectively to a religious community, like a church, and not any one person. Although, you know, admittedly they did take great care to mark their own belongings as theirs if this really was community wealth but whatever. So, why did this church, why did this congregation go bury all this super valuable stuff, these heirlooms, some of it hundreds of years old already even in their day, why did they go bury it in a random field? Well there’s evidence that it wasn’t just a field at that time. There was actually a building on top of the treasure. When they were digging everything up, they found some daub, as in wattle and daub, which is like a clay, mud substance with either straw or animal hair in it that was used for building, to hold together and fill walls. They also did a geophysical survey that revealed the hoard had been buried under the corner of a rectangular building made of timbers, made of wood. They found evidence of a double row of posts that would have formed the walls of this building. So it kind of seems like they buried the stuff under the floor of a building, possibly an early church that long since rotted and disintegrated. But it’s also possible that the building was built later just sort of coincidentally on top of the buried treasure. According to Wikipedia though quote “The survey and earlier aerial photography showed that the building had been constructed within a large, rectilinear double-ditched enclosure which was partitioned by a separate enclosure. According to historical sources, an early Christian ecclesiastical foundation was located nearby and the hoard's site may have been associated with monastic activity,” end quote. Translation, there was evidence that the Galloway Hoard was found buried within a religious complex, like a monastery.
So, I think, you know, when we consider all of that, all of the clues. I think it becomes somewhat clear what happened here. We have Anglo-Saxon Christian, religious folk, at least 5 people, who are clearly part of a church, a monastery burying valuables during a time when their home, Northumbria was being overtaken by pagan Viking invaders. It seems like they didn’t want this community wealth, this wealth belonging to their church community to be stolen by the Vikings. Now, they never came back for it. Why? Well, they either died or they left the area, those are really the only two explanations. This had to have been a very tumultuous time in this area. By 900, the Vikings were pretty much in charge. The currency was Viking, the language was Viking, Norse, Scandinavian. The Vikings had taken over. The Anglo-Saxons left in Northumbria had all but been conquered by these pagan invaders from the north. And so, to me, this is them trying to hold on to these relics, these last vestiges of their culture, their religion in a world that was rapidly changing. The Galloway Hoard is a window into worlds colliding, an important part of the formation of the world we live in today. It’s part of the explanation of who we are and how we got here.
We like to think of ourselves as these distinct groups. I’m British or I’m Norwegian. I’m German. I’m African. I’m Asian. Whatever it is. Humans like to form groups. It’s biological I suppose. We are pack animals. We like to form these distinct groups, these tribes. But when you look back at our history, we are all such an amalgamation of so many different groups and evidence of that can really be seen in the Galloway Hoard. A Scottish person today might be proud of their Scottish heritage. But what is Scottish? Scottish is Celtic, ancient Briton. It’s ancient Roman and then the Romans interbred with North Africans so it’s also African. It’s Anglo-Saxon, it’s Scandinavian, Norse, Viking, which recent evidence suggests they brought back Indigenous American wives from present day Newfoundland, Canada. What do these words, these names for these distinct groups, what do they even mean if they’ve all been mixed together at some point. The Galloway Hoard reminds us that the world is really all one big melting pot. That each of these distinct groups, we try so hard to cling to actually belong to one unified group, human kind.
Since its discovery in 2014, The Galloway Hoard has mostly been housed at the National Museum of Scotland which is sort of its home base. However, it travels around the world and goes on display at various other museums too. I think that’s really cool because of the inscription on that one armband, “dis is higna feoh,” “this is community wealth.” The buryers of the Galloway Hoard wrote that. It wasn’t Eggbert’s. It wasn’t Bishop Hygauld’s. It wasn’t Ed’s. It belonged to the community and it still does. It belongs to human kind.
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