The St Ninian's Isle Treasure

On 4 July 1958 a local schoolboy who had just joined a University of Aberdeen dig on St Ninian's Isle, a tied island off the west coast of Shetland, noticed a broken sandstone slab with a faint cross scratched on it. It lay close to the foundations of the chancel arch of a buried medieval chapel. Beneath it, in the decayed remains of a larch-wood box, was a tangle of silver. The excavation director, Professor Andrew O'Dell, later wrote that the bowls lay upside down with the brooches knotted together among them, as if the box had been carried in a hurry and buried top down.

The hoard contains 28 objects of silver and silver-gilt, the finest group of early medieval silver from Scotland. Twelve are penannular brooches, the large ring brooches worn by the Pictish elite, with terminals shaped as animal heads or as lobed and geometric panels. Eight are bowls, decorated with punched and engraved patterns; one is a hanging bowl, a type normally made in bronze. There is a small spoon, a knife or prong, three little silver cones, two scabbard chapes and a sword pommel. Packed in with them was part of a porpoise's jawbone.

Not everything is Pictish. The two chapes and the pommel look Anglo-Saxon and were probably made in Mercia in the late 8th century; one chape carries a short inscription in Old English. Weapons and weapon fittings travelled widely as gifts between rulers, and these pieces show Shetland linked to the courts of southern Britain.

The mix of objects has puzzled scholars. The brooches and sword fittings belong to the secular world of an aristocratic household, while the bowls, the spoon and the setting beneath a church floor suggest something ecclesiastical. One reading is that local people entrusted family valuables to the church for safekeeping; another is that the bowls served in the church's own rituals. The porpoise jaw has been explained as a relic, though nobody can say whose.

The objects were made in the later 8th century, and the burial is usually placed around 800. That is exactly when Norse raiders began to strike the Northern Isles, and the hurried packing fits a moment of danger. Shetland was soon fully Scandinavian, and whoever hid the box never returned.

Because the treasure came out of a controlled excavation, archaeologists know exactly where and how it lay, which is rare for hoards of this date. Its ownership was then settled in the courts: in Lord Advocate v. University of Aberdeen, heard in the Court of Session, the Crown's claim to it as treasure trove prevailed, and the hoard was allocated to the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland in 1965-66. A 2023 petition asked for it to return to Shetland permanently; the originals have returned twice on loan, in 1966 and in 2008 for the fiftieth anniversary of the find.