NORTH Yorkshire has been officially declared one of the most likely places in the country where valuable buried treasure can be found.

In the past nine years 421 items of gold and silver jewellery, along with items of pottery and ancient objects have been unearthed mostly by metal detectorists.

The finds which are worth thousands and thousands of pounds have revealed fascinating and often unknown facts and information of the past.

One of the most impressive, the Bedale hoard, thought to be the long lost life savings of a Viking visitor, which was valued by experts at £51,636 was found buried in a field near the town in 2012 and is now on show at the Yorkshire Museum in York.

A team of analysts from jewellerybox used government data on treasure and portable antiques to find the number of treasure and portable antiques discovered in and around the UK in the past nine years. North Yorkshire is the sixth best place to find buried treasure and the leading one in the North.

The Isle of Wight is the leading hotspot for treasure followed by Norfolk which had the highest number of finds at 917, Suffolk had 581 and Lincolnshire 520.

A spokesman for Jewellerybox said: "Britain's historical past means that buried treasure and precious metals can be found in all manner of places up and down the country. Since 2012, 8,775 pieces of buried treasure have been found throughout Britain."

The Bedale hoard was discovered by detectorists Stuart Campbell and Steve Caswell, from Masham and includes a gold sword pommel, a silver neck ring and neck collar as well as many ingots of silver, the likes of which had never previously been recorded in the area.

They spent many hours researching the local landscape to identify areas likely to provide interesting finds and once out on site studied the features of the land to interpret how it would have been used by people hundreds of years ago.

Mr Campbell said: "Steve said to me 'there is something there'. He kept saying it and I kept going back, I had 25 visits on that same field. Each time we went we were finding things, button and coins, from Medieval times onwards."

Eventually, the side light from a setting sun suggested the existence of a Roman road, said Mr Campbell, and that gave him the final clue about where he needed to look. He said: "I pulled the four stranded necklace out first. I thought it was just a piece of discarded power cable."

A public appeal was launched by the museum to buy the hoard.

The most famous pieces of treasure found in North Yorkshire was the Middleham jewel, a gold and sapphire pendant thought to have links to Richard 111 which was found by detectorists in 1985 and sold for £2.5m.

One expert who did not want to be named added: "There has been a lot of treasure discovered in North Yorkshire, and hopefully there is more out there, but there are strict rules about how you can search and discovered treasure must be reported to the local coroner within 14 days ."

https://www.jewellerybox.co.uk/blog/buried-treasure-britain/