The Skaill Hoard

In March 1858 a boy digging at a rabbit hole near the parish church of Sandwick, above the Bay of Skaill on Orkney's west coast, turned up a few pieces of silver. Word spread. A few days later a group of local people waiting on the shore for seaweed went to look, one pushed a fork into the burrow and pulled out a parcel of brooches and neck-rings, and a free-for-all followed. Each person kept what he could grab.

It took the sheriff clerk of Orkney, George Petrie, to put the hoard back together. He went to Sandwick, explained the Crown's claim to treasure trove, advanced the finders £7 against a proper reward, and persuaded them to hand over what they admitted to holding; a fourth share had already been passed to a local landlord, who gave it up to the sheriff. Petrie recovered sixteen pounds of silver. Even so, not everything came in: eight further pieces from the hoard reached the national museum in the 20th century.

The archaeologist James Graham-Campbell estimated that the complete hoard weighed about eight kilograms, comparable to the largest Viking-age silver hoards from Scandinavia itself. It contains over a hundred items. Most are ornaments rather than coins: big penannular 'thistle' brooches, at least sixteen of them, Scandinavian neck-rings and arm-rings, pins, ingots, cut silver, and thirty-six plain penannular arm-rings of the kind sometimes called 'ring-money', a standardised form of bullion.

Two complete brooches and a loose terminal are decorated with beasts, birds and tendrils in a style between the Scandinavian Jellinge and Mammen styles. The ornament seems to come from the hand of one craftsman, probably trained in the Irish Sea world, where similar carving appears on Manx crosses. Many objects bear small testing nicks where their silver had been checked, a sign they had passed through several hands before ending up in Orkney.

Only 21 coins were found, less than half a per cent of the silver by weight. Nineteen are Islamic dirhams, the latest struck under the caliph al-Mustakfi in 944-6, and the absence of the common English coins of King Eadred, issued from 946, suggests the hoard went into the ground around 950. Why it was buried is unknown: it may have been hidden for safekeeping by someone who never returned. It remains, by a wide margin, the largest Viking silver hoard found in Scotland.