Tourist trinkets, Roman-style

Copyright Dominic Coyne (see details below)

See this lovely thing? It’s quite small – 47mm high and 94mm in diameter – but simply glorious. The colours are vivid shades of red, blue, turquoise and yellow, enamelled in a swirling native ‘celtic’ design of roundels, petals, and what the British Museum cutely call, ‘whirligigs’. The metal encasing the enamel is a copper alloy, so it would originally have been a lustrous reddish-gold shade. It’s actually more like a pan than a bowl as it would originally have had a dinky bow-shaped handle. And it’s about 1850 years old.

It was found by a metal detectorist in Staffordshire in 2003, but experts believe that it was made here in Cumbria as a very early visitor souvenir. The writing near the rim is in Latin and says,

The Crosby Garret Roman Helmet – The One That Got Away

In May 2010,  a metal detectorist from Peterlee in the northeast of England was in a field near Crosby Garrett in the Eden Valley  in Cumbria. He found 68 pieces of folded metal, carefully placed on a face-shaped mask.

Crosby Garrett Helmet at the sale (Flickr)

At first, the detectorist had no idea what he’d found. He’d discovered a handful of Roman coins on the site before – not too surprising given that the field is close to a Roman road – but there was no official record of previous habitation thereabouts¹. The detectorist decided that the metal pieces were some sort of Victorian ornament.