🏴🇬🇧 3,500 years ago a Welsh goldsmith beat a single ingot of gold...
Thin enough to wrap around the shoulders of a child.
In 1833 quarry workmen broke it into pieces.
It took the British Museum 120 years to put it back together.
In October 1833, a team of workmen dug into a Bronze Age burial mound at Bryn yr Ellyllon, Mold, Flintshire, looking for stone for a wall. They broke into the cist. They found a small skeleton. And beside the bones, beaten flat against the stone, a sheet of gold.
564 grams of it. About 75% pure. Hammered thin. Worked in concentric bands of beaten pattern across the surface. Shaped to wrap around the shoulders of someone small.
🏛️ The workmen had no idea what they had. They split the gold between themselves and took it home.
Pieces were sold off, melted down, used as keepsakes.
A vicar wrote it up in The Cambrian. Decades later a museum officer began the work of finding the fragments and buying them back.
The reassembly took until 1953. 120 years from the day it was broken open. The British Museum's conservators pieced it back together against a leather backing, one fragment at a time, until the cape was whole.
It is the finest prehistoric goldwork ever found in Britain. Worked by a Welsh hand. For a child the village had set apart. In a country where the gold for it was mined, the bronze for the tools came from Cornwall, and the people who walked the hill knew the shape of every slope.
🇬🇧 You were told the finest prehistoric goldwork was continental. It was Welsh. And it is still in the British Museum.
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They preserved the child in gold.
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