The Ardagh Hoard and the Ardagh Chalice

In September 1868 two boys, Jim Quin and Paddy Flanagan, were digging potatoes inside a ringfort called Reerasta, beside the village of Ardagh in west County Limerick. Under a stone slab they found a large silver cup with other objects tucked inside it. The cup was the Ardagh Chalice, one of the most celebrated pieces of medieval metalwork in Europe.

Quin's mother sold the find to the Catholic Bishop of Limerick, George Butler, who in turn sold it to the Royal Irish Academy; accounts differ on the prices. When the new National Museum opened in Dublin in 1890, the Academy's antiquities passed to it, and the chalice has been on show there ever since. Flanagan stayed in Limerick; Quin emigrated to Australia and died in Melbourne in 1934.

The chalice is a broad, two-handled bowl of beaten silver on a conical foot, assembled from some 350 separate components. A girdle below the rim holds panels of gold filigree, animals, birds and interlace worked in wire so fine that two layers are sometimes soldered one over the other, punctuated by studs of red and blue enamel and glass. The names of the apostles are lightly engraved around the bowl, and even the underside of the foot is decorated. What sets it apart, more than the detail, is the restraint: the ornament is concentrated in bands and roundels, leaving the smooth silver to carry the shape.

With it were a plain stemmed cup of copper alloy and four brooches. Three are pseudo-penannular brooches, large ornate dress fasteners of the kind worn by high-status lay people and, it seems, by clergy fastening their vestments. The fourth is a thistle brooch, a simpler true penannular type with globular, thistle-like terminals, and it is the youngest object in the group, made around 900.

So the hoard brings together pieces of different ages. The chalice dates from the 8th century; the thistle brooch is more than a century younger. The group was evidently buried in a hurry, under nothing more than a slab, in or around the Viking Age. An old story that the chalice was looted from the monastery of Clonmacnoise by a Limerick Viking cannot be proved. The discovery in 1980 of the closely related Derrynaflan Chalice in neighbouring Tipperary makes an origin in Munster, among the church foundations patronised by the region's kings, at least as likely.

The chalice became a national emblem. It appeared on an Irish definitive stamp in the early 1990s, and two of the Gaelic Athletic Association's trophies, the Sam Maguire Cup for Gaelic football and the O'Duffy Cup for camogie, are modelled on it.