Broighter Gold
hoard of gold artefacts from the 1st century BC that were found in 1896 in the north of Ireland
The Broighter Gold or more correctly, the Broighter Hoard, is a hoard of gold artefacts from the Iron Age of the 1st century BC that were found in 1896 by Tom Nicholl and James Morrow on farmland near Limavady, Northern Ireland. The hoard includes a 7-inch-long (18 cm) gold boat, a gold torc and bowl and some other jewellery.
The National Museum of Ireland, who now hold the hoard, describe the torc as the "finest example of Irish La Tène goldworking". Replicas of the collection are kept at the Ulster Museum in Belfast.
A somewhat puzzling aspect of the hoard is that scientific analysis suggests the same source for the gold in all the pieces, but they show a great diversity in style, from Celtic to Roman.
A design from the hoard has been used as an image on the 1996 issue of the Northern Ireland British one-pound coins and the gold ship featured in a design on the last Irish commemorative one-pound coins. The Broighter Collar and Broighter Ship also featured on definitive postage stamps of Ireland from 1990 to 1995.
Discovery
The hoard was found near Lough Foyle in a field in the townland of Broighter (Irish: Brú Íochtair, meaning 'lower fort') 2 km northwest of Limavady in County Londonderry. It was discovered by Thomas Nicholl and James Morrow while working as ploughmen for Joseph L. Gibson in February 1896. They found the hoard whilst double ploughing.
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This entry incorporates text from “Broighter Gold” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.