SILVERDALE VIKING COIN HOARD TO BE DISPLAYED

A spectacular stash of Viking treasure – more than 200 pieces of silver including beautiful arm rings, brooches, silver ingots, and a battered, misspelt coin that revealed a previously unknown Viking ruler – will go on display this month near where it was found by a metal-detector enthusiast two years ago.

The hoard was found packed into a lead container inches below the surface of a field in Lancashire. But whether it would be displayed in the county where it was found had seemed in doubt in the economic climate.

Now, though, Lancashire county museum service has raised the £110,000 that it needed to acquire the third-largest Viking hoard found in the UK, with the help of a £45,000 grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, £33,000 from the Art Fund charity, plus other grants and local donations.

Dozens of coins dated the hoard to about AD900, and also demonstrated the breadth of the Viking world, including Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian, Frankish and Islamic examples. The rarest – with a cross dating it to the time when the Vikings adopted the powerful new god of the Christians – bears the name Airdeconut, believed to be an attempt at the Scandinavian Harthacnut, a previously unrecorded ruler. There was also a coin minted for the nephew of Alfred the Great, and a fake coin with a thin film of silver over copper.

Dame Jenny Abramsky, chair of the memorial fund, said: "The Silverdale hoard offers a unique window into the lives and craftsmanship of the Vikings who inhabited Lancashire over 1,000 years ago. The fund exists to make sure historic gems such as this are not lost from this country and so our trustees felt it was vital it should be saved for future generations to learn from and enjoy."

To read the complete article, see: Silverdale Viking treasure to go on display in Lancashire (www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/oct/11/silverdale-viking-treasure-display-lancashire)

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