Whorl Hill and its Buried Treasure

Scarth Wood Moor. Third Thursday running. Too hot for ditch digging, and my back agreed with the thermometer.

An early finish saved the day, though. A glance over the wall gave up a proper reward: Whorl Hill, sat there like a pudding basin turned upside down, the glacial leftover that gave Whorlton parish its name.

Somewhere on that cone sits a rather sad story. A Romano-Briton, perhaps running from raiders, buried his savings in an urn and never came back for them. Whatever became of him is anyone’s guess, but his bad luck was a ploughman’s good fortune some sixteen centuries later. The plough struck the urn wrapped in leather, and inside lay a small fortune: silver coins by the fistful, silver ornaments, a spoon, and a few ingots for good measure.

Two stones the whole hoard weighed. The coins nearest the top had eroded away to nothing, and the soil around them had turned purple with the stain of it, but those deeper in the urn had survived in mint condition. Our ploughman was not the first to strike it lucky on that hill either. Three or four generations before him, a gold coin of Arcadius turned up, and a molehill once obliged with a gold armilla, a military armband, courtesy of the little gentleman in black velvet doing what he does best¹NYMNPA HER No:  284. Roman silver hoard found at Whorl Hill ²WICKEDNESS AND TYRANNY. Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail. 2 May 1974. Page 11.

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  NYMNPA HER No:  284. Roman silver hoard found at Whorl Hill  ↩︎
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  WICKEDNESS AND TYRANNY. Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail. 2 May 1974. Page 11 ↩︎