Posted on by Derek Turner

Treasure island

The Parable of the Hidden Treasure by Gerard Dou

Treasures on Earth – Buried Wealth in Landscape and Legend

Jeremy Harte, London: Reaktion, 2026, 292pps., £15
DEREK TURNER reads about hunts for hidden hoards

In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton offers some sensible advice as one of his ‘Remedies against discontents’ – “Seek that which may be found.” Jeremy Harte’s subtle and finely written new book examines the countless Britons who have taken exactly the opposite approach.

Harte is a romantic and an indefatigable follower of tantalising trails, having written to excellent effect on the Devil in England, and the history of gypsies – and so feels empathy with the delvers and dreamers who from earliest history have hankered after treasures that are occasionally wonderfully real but much more usually imaginary. Rumours of hidden hoards speak to some of our deepest psychological requirements.

Treasure can be found, or visualised, in many places – burial mounds, castles, caves, churches, old houses, tunnels and under landmark stones. The Honours of Scotland were even concealed in a bed. Hoards have been envisioned as spectral specie guarded by demons, dragons (there are some 30 British placenames containing the root-word draca, dragon), fairies or monsters, only accessible to astrologers and ‘mystical sciencers’ – like the Elizabethan polymath John Dee, who tried to persuade the Lord High Treasurer to grant him a royal licence to hunt for caches guarded by such fearsome ‘kepars’. Traditionary treasure hunts almost always take place by night, tense events whose codified procedures are usually derailed by unnatural storms, strange lights or panic attacks, or when some searcher emits an excited oath just as the hoard hoves into view.

Hoards have also been seen as traces of vanished races, or mythologized individuals from King Arthur to the North Country bogeyman ‘Long Lankin’ – or more prosaically as the left-behind legacies of real-life despoliations and downfalls. The Dissolution of the monasteries and the Civil Wars left in their respective aftermaths countless rumours of secreted wealth, suggesting long-persisting sociocultural trauma. Buried treasures have also often been imagined in border areas, relatively plausible because of such regions’ turbulent pasts – suitably liminal locales for things themselves evanescent and uncertain.

Treasure’s potential presence in a landscape attests not just to a desire for actual wealth, but also our habit of investing hard earth with pleasant fictions. A fabulous hidden hoard can constitute a source of local pride, like the golden stag concealed somewhere near Llantwit Major which when found would allow the modest Glamorgan town to regain its early medieval eminence as Celtic Christian cultural powerhouse.

Hoards can also be symbols of non-temporal power. Treasure tales cluster in historically poorer or more remote districts, and in many of these stories ghostly guardians wishing to unburden themselves of guiltily got gains that are tying them to the earth select the virtuous poor as recipients of their eerie instructions, phantasms offering a chance of advancement in return for absolution. Treasure-tales have frequently been cautionary parables, affording moralisers agreeable opportunities to expound on the greed, gullibility or unscrupulousness of their fellow humans. Wealth has always been regarded as sniffily suspect, especially when its origins are opaque. It is hardly surprising that some troves were supposed to have been cursed. Treasure, Harte observes, “can never quite be cleansed from the blood and sweat that laid it in the ground.”

Treasures are sensationally unearthed – Mildenhall, Snettisham, Sutton Hoo – but much more often they are not, even when searched for systematically (or obsessively). This is hardly surprising, as most traditions are extremely vague, such as the Selkirkshire saying that the fabled “gowd” of Tamleuchar would be found “atween the wat grund and the dry”. Such discoveries as there have been have almost always happened accidentally.

Harte opens with one such incident in 1840, when the Cuerdale Hoard of silver was uncovered by workmen working on flood defences along the Ribble near Preston – 7,500 coins, 350 ingots and 1,000 fragments of buckles and jewellery – buried by retreating Vikings around 911, the largest early medieval hoard ever discovered in England. That part of Lancashire already had legends of buried treasure; there had been previous unsuccessful searches in and around Cuerdale (where Roman remains had been found), and there would be several more after 1840. Nearby Ribchester had famously disgorged an ornate Roman helmet in 1796 (now in the British Museum), which had seemed to bear out a local saying William Camden had recorded as long before as 1586 – “It is written upon a wall in Rome Ribchester was as rich as any town in Christendom”.

Many antiquarians saw such discoveries as suggesting that traditions about local hoards must have at least some basis in fact, although in many cases these ‘traditions’ were post-hoc confabulations. One example comes from Wales. The prehistoric gold peytral that was discovered in Mold in 1833 came from a hill whose Welsh name, Bryn-yr-Ellyllon, can be translated as ‘Hill of Goblins’, where it was said there had long been tales of golden ghosts glimpsed at night. But these traditions were not recorded until after 1833.

For obvious reasons, hoarding is usually carried out in secret, so it is difficult to see how it could lead to any tradition in the first place – whereas the excitement of finding treasure encourages people to see prefiguring patterns. If people really knew where treasure was stashed, they would almost certainly obtain it for themselves rather than talking about it to others. Almost all attempts at ostension – when traditions are subjected to tests – end in failure. Yet the allure never dims.

Treasure-hunting goes back a long way, and everywhere is fraught with contradictions. There was supposedly once a wayside stone near Damascus which bore the legend, “If you dig here, you will be sorry; if you do not dig you will be sorry also.” In Britain, there are eighth century runic inscriptions about hidden treasure in the Orkneys, and the contemporaneous Vita of Lincolnshire’s St. Guthlac records the traces of hopeful fossicks in the Fens. Gold glitters with the greatest lustre because of its scarcity. It was not used to make everyday currency – the Edward III noble, introduced in 1344, was the first relatively widely circulated gold coin – so was always associated with display, nobility, royalty and sacrality. Lost gold crowns are an especial leitmotif of lore, from King John’s crown allegedly lost in the Wash by way of the Crown of King Edward which vanished in 1649 to M R. James’s celebrated 1925 story A Warning to the Curious, about a legendary lost diadem of the Angles and its deadly custodian. Local saints were often imagined as sleeping in golden coffins, and the Holy Grail as a golden chalice. Buried gold is rarely seen as realisable riches, but more as a talisman and means of transmutation, all the brighter for being ultimately unobtainable.

For many treasure-hunters, the riches they seek often seem less important than their itch to search. Actually finding something could even prove anticlimactic. Anatomy of Melancholy to the contrary, seeking things which cannot be found may be a better ‘remedy against discontent’. As Charles R. Beard notes in his 1933 survey The Romance of Treasure Trove, “Treasure-hunting is like virtue; it is generally its own reward.” There are things hidden in the human psyche, we conclude, that surpass the wildest dreams of avarice.

This review first appeared in Country Squire, and is reproduced with permission

Posted on by Paul Garner

Lincolnshire – a land apart

Crowland Abbey. Photo: Derek Turner
Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire
Derek Turner, Hurst & Co., 2022, hb., 446pps, 32 col. Illus. & map, £20
PAUL GARNER enjoys a survey of an oddly little-known county

Edge of England is a rich tapestry woven of many threads—history, nature, industry, geography, religion and folklore—all intertwining to create a picture full of interest. It tells the story, or rather multiplexity of stories, of the author’s adopted county of Lincolnshire, an unjustly overlooked and unfashionable part of England, one that is often, as the author reminds us in his opening chapter, the butt of snide jokes and liberal disdain. Turner’s book challenges this snobbery and prejudice, revealing “a county like no other … an England time half-forgot, where you can still find an unabashed past inside an unpretentious present—and freedom and space on a little offshore island”.

Turner delights the reader with captivating tales of eccentric characters, atmospheric places and intriguing events, his wide reading and breadth of knowledge apparent on every page. A thousand and one rabbit trails are laid by the author, any one of which could profitably be followed by an inquisitive reader. We learn about the lives and times of many sons and daughters of the shire, some well-known, others less so. Among the colourful characters that we meet are parliamentarians, scientists, explorers, military men, poets and writers, and religious figures.

The more familiar include John Wesley, the evangelical clergyman whose spirited preaching was the fountainhead of the emerging Methodist movement, Sir Isaac Newton, the scientific prodigy who developed differential calculus while sheltering from the plague at Woolsthorpe in 1665, and Dutch engineer, Cornelius Vermuyden, whose land reclamation work met with fierce opposition from locals, who feared dispossession. But we are also introduced to less familiar personalities, such as the cantankerous nineteenth-century contrarian, Sir Charles Sibthorp, who, as MP for the city of Lincoln, vehemently opposed steam railways, water closets and barrel organs, the polymathic Sir Joseph Banks, who accompanied Captain Cook aboard HMS Endeavour, and amassed important collections of botanical specimens, and the demon-afflicted Saint Guthlac, who, at the end of the seventh century, established a hermitage at Crowland, destined, after his death, to become a monastic centre and place of Christian pilgrimage.

Turner writes with affection of the ordinary people of Lincolnshire. They are kind, practical, helpful and courteous, even to outsiders, and when they get to know you “accord you the ultimate sign of acceptance—telling you about the idiocy of London”. He describes, with wistful melancholia, Lincolnshire’s lost villages, decaying industries and disappearing ways of life, but does not rub salt into the wounds in the fashion of some unkind commentators. Grimsby may be down-at-heel today, with “a depressed town centre, and too much bad housing”, but Turner writes movingly of the skill and bravery of its sailors and fishermen, and the fortitude of their families, ensuring that the reader knows of the town’s epic origins, regal connections, and dogged “tough pride.”

Many absorbing stories are related, ranging from the whimsical and quirky to the ghoulish and macabre. There is the curious tale of the “Stamford Schism”, an ill-fated attempt by a cadre of unhappy students and tutors from Oxford to establish a rival institution at Stamford in 1333. It was a short-lived venture, the brass door knocker the students took with them when they left Oxford now proudly displayed above high table at Brasenose, in the manner of a spoil of war. The Haxey Hood is another oddity, a game played every January in the town of Haxey, during which enthusiastic locals chase a group of costumed “Boggins” around the town in pursuit of a leather bolster, ostensibly re-enacting an incident with a riding hood said to have taken place almost 700 years ago.

Grisly crimes, pogroms and witch trials are also part of the county’s story. For instance, Turner tells of the tragic death of poor Mary Kirkham in 1806, and the execution of her murderer and erstwhile suitor, Tom Otter, whose skull was said to have provided a home for nesting blue tits when he was gibbeted at Saxilby. However, one of the darkest episodes in the county’s history took place in 1255, when an antisemitic rumour began to circulate in Lincoln that a young boy named Hugh had been murdered by a local Jewish man. This led not only to the arrest, torture and execution of the suspect, but the imprisonment of ninety-one others, eighteen of whom were also executed. The boy’s burial place became a shrine, and “Little Saint Hugh” acquired legendary status, becoming the subject of ballads and folk songs.

Those who, like me, appreciate tales of the strange and uncanny will enjoy reading about the ghostly goings-on at Epworth Rectory, home, in the eighteenth century, not only to the Wesleys, but also, it was said, to a noisy and disincarnate spirit called “Old Jeffrey”. We learn of the spectral “Green Lady” who haunts a tree-lined avenue near Thorpe Hall in Louth, and the “Black Lady” of Bradley Woods, still weeping for her lost children. The county also has tales of water sprites, wild men and mysterious big cats, and, although not mentioned by Turner, Black Shuck, the demonic hellhound that patrols the county’s byways, its red eyes flaming like coals through the fen mists.1 Anyone eager to explore the supernatural aspects of Lincolnshire further may want to consult a series of hair-raising articles by Rob Gandy in recent editions of Fortean Times.2

Turner says of the Lincolnshire-born antiquarian, William Stukeley, that he could see “the magic of words”. If so, Stukeley would have appreciated the spellbinding mellifluosity of Turner’s own writing. Almost every page yields memorable examples. Consider, for instance, Turner’s charming distillation of one village’s peculiarities and idiosyncrasies as “a little ampoule of English eccentricity” – his spinetingling description of old gateways as “unquiet, touched by the memories of everyone who has ever gone through them, especially if they never came back” – and his description of a carved stone man, high on the forlorn ruins of Barlings Abbey, abandoned at the time of the Dissolution, “stuck in eternal outrage, his mouth forever open as if howling at all this sacrilege and sky”. Turner sees poetry in the everyday, as when he recalls a dead carrion crow, “lying in a patch of sun beneath trees, intact and gleamingly black, studded with iridescent greenbottles, like a mislaid piece of Visigoth jewellery”, or when he waxes lyrical about the vistas that open up from the Humber bridge, “especially to the west on a warm evening when it has been raining, with the sun going down in splendour, and backlit air and water so full of each other that it is like being inside a pearl”.

The reader is also treated to some wonderfully dry asides, perhaps my favourite being an anecdote about a cringeworthy sermon given by the new Bishop of Lincoln at his enthronement, its low culture references jarring awkwardly with the high pomp of the ceremony that had preceded it. Turner concludes, somewhat archly, “The Order of Service read ‘After the sermon, silence is kept for a few moments,’ and it was, but not necessarily for the right reasons”.

Edge of England is a book to savour and is accompanied by thirty-two colour plates and a rather beautiful, Tolkienesque map in which the Wolds take on something of the aspect of the “misty mountains”.

Notes

  • Ethel Rudkin, ‘The Black Dog,’ Folklore 49 no. 2, 111-131 (1938).
  • ‘The Ruskington horror,’ Fortean Times 401, 32-38 (January 2021); ‘The Ruskington horror: part 2,’ Fortean Times 402, 38-43 (February 2021); ‘The Ruskington goblin,’ Fortean Times 405, 48-38 (May 2021); ‘Weird wheels of the Wolds,’ Fortean Times 407, 48-51 (July 2021); ‘Scary stories from Scunthorpe,’ Fortean Times 411, 48-52 (November 2021); ‘Not the face,’ Fortean Times 414, 46-47 (January 2022); ‘Lincolnshire’s bevy of the bizarre,’ Fortean Times 416, 44-48 (March 2022); ‘A warning to the Fortean,’ Fortean Times 421, 42-45 (August 2022); ‘A grand fen-ale!’ Fortean Times 423, 42-45 (October 2022)