NB There are more options than gaps so you will not use all of them.
1. On a raw November morning, Cliff Bradshaw was working a potato field in Kent with his metal detector when he heard a faint, high- pitched whine through his earphones. ‘It was the tiniest possible signal,’ he says. ‘I knew it couldn’t be iron because the machine would have made a growling noise. I scuffed the ground with my foot and tried again. The sound became more and more high-pitched as I dug down until it was shrieking in my earphones.’
2. Three weeks earlier he had found a rare seventh century gold coin on the same site, then four spindle whorls, followed by a silver strap-end from a Saxon belt and a gilded Saxon button- brooch. Yet he felt this was going to be different. More than a foot below the surface, he saw the gleam of what could only be gold. Buried silver goes grey, bronze goes green and iron turns rusty, but gold comes out of the ground as brilliant as the day it went in. As a symbol of permanence, there’s nothing like it. That is its magic - for the metalworker, for the collector, for kings, for lovers, for treasure-hunters.
3. Bradshaw threw his excavating spade to one side and scraped with his hands until he had exposed the whole object. It was a corrugated cup made of sheet gold, savagely crushed on one side where it had been struck by a subsoiling machine, but still beautiful. There were tiny dots all around the rim and it had a broad, decorated handle secured with lozenge-shaped washers. Because of its round base, in its crumpled state it looked like a misshapen heart.
4. ‘I knew it was gold. I knew it was old. But there was no real jump for joy,’ says Bradshaw. ‘I never sell my stuff and I honestly didn’t think about the money. I was just shocked. The real excitement for me was finding the prehistoric barrow where I was detecting - just a foot or so of raised earth that was once as high of a I house. It was difficult to see. No one had noticed it before.
