Iron Age hoard to give up gold treasure ‘before the year is out’

Experts have been working for months, carefully extracting, measuring, cleaning and cataloguing thousands of coins from the find.

And buried within the hoard are a group of gold torques that stand out from the greenish copper corrosion that has formed over the years.

Soon those items will be unpicked, as workers – helped by a dedicated group of volunteers – continue to unpick the find.

Until recently the hoard, and the surrounding operation, had been on display at Jersey Museum in the art gallery.

However, with a new Ice Age exhibition due to be unveiled in that space later this autumn, the coins have been moved to La Hougue Bie – the Jersey Heritage site that contains one of Europe’s best-preserved Neolithic passage graves.

Jersey Museum conservator Neil Mahrer working on the hoard at La Hougue Bie

And experts, led by Jersey Museum conservator Neil Mahrer, have now returned to picking apart the hoard after the team’s precision laser arm, which is used to measure each coin in its original location, returned from its annual maintenance.

Mr Mahrer said: ‘We’ve got a similar, but slightly bigger, room here compared to the Museum. It’s a very nice space that has glass walls so that people can see the work that is going on.

‘There’s been a bit of a break while our machine was being serviced, but we think that two months of scanning and coin removal will get us to the point at which we can remove the gold jewellery we can see.

‘We’re hoping to have a special event over the course of a week about moving the gold and cleaning it up. It will be great to get that material out.’

Earlier this year the project took on volunteers to help with the work, allowing the team to work much faster than before.

And in July British Museum researcher Dr Eleanor Ghey visited the coin collection, found by metal detectorists Reg Mead and Richard Miles in a Grouville field in 2012, and praised the way the findings from the hoard were being recorded.

A gold ring found in the coin hoard

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