To Suffolk! the county about 80 miles NE of the metropolis, birthplace of John Constable, Benjamin Britten and George Orwell. Full of flat lands, fat pigs and picturesque seaside towns, it feels a world away from the capital.
But we’re not here for a trip to the coast. Today we’re standing in a field near the River Deben, gazing at some bumps and mounds, because we’re at Sutton Hoo, the place of one of the most significant archaeological finds of the 20th century.
This is now a National Trust site (with a quite punitive entrance fee if you’re not an NT member), but in the 1930s the 200+ hectares of land and the house that stands here was owned by Mrs Edith Pretty, a widow of a Suffolk man and the heiress of a considerable fortune from her industrialist father.
It was she who commissioned the local (self-taught) archaeologist Basil Brown to excavate the mounds, apparently after a spiritualist had spoken of ‘presences’ within the mound field.
The mounds that Brown excavated in the summer of 1938 were almost bereft of finds, obviously having been robbed out at some time in the past, but he did find in one mound some ship rivets and evidence of a central burial chamber with a few scraps of interesting artefacts. The following year Brown returned to excavate the poetically named ‘Mound 1’ and it was in this that the remains of an undisturbed Anglo-Saxon ship burial were found, the outline of the boat preserved in the earth and an astonishing wealth of grave goods.
Because Edith Pretty donated all the finds to the British Museum you can walk into Room 41 of the museum and see these on display – wonderful gold and garnet pieces, the famous (apologies, but I’m going to use the word ‘iconic’) helmet, the sword and shield of a warrior king and much (much) more. Here’s me talking about some of them on a lockdown video.
The Sutton Hoo site does a very good job of contextualising both the finds and the 1938/9 (and subsequent) excavations. A sculptural representation of the ship greets you at the entrance and is impressively large (27 metres – about 88 feet). The effort involved in 7th century burials is highlighted when you discover that the ship was probably carried by dozens of warriors up from the River Deben to the burial site. A ‘hoo’ is a prominent spit of high ground, so this process involved a steep climb uphill.
Mound 1 is thought to be the grave of King Raedwald who died in 625, a grandson of Wuffa who was the first of the Wuffingas dynasty of kings of the East Angles. Sutton Hoo is the royal graveyard of the 6th/7th century rulers, whose ‘palace’ was a little further upriver at Rendlesham. Erecting these tall mounds on the hoo would have made them visible for miles around, and anyone sailing up the river from the coast would have seen them and realised they were in the territory of powerful warlords.
I’d expected to be 2-3 hours at the site, but ended up being there for much of the day. A viewing tower allows you to climb up and look down on the ‘mound field’ (with 18 or so visible), but even better is to sign up for one of the free conducted tours ‘behind the rope’ and amongst the mounds themselves (a shout out to Spencer our guide here). A historian will walk you through the field and explain the history of the local anglo-saxons, the context of the site and Basil Brown’s and subsequent excavations, and the importance of the finds.
What was Sutton Hoo house (now called Tranter House), the home of Mrs Pretty and family is where you can learn about the 1938/9 excavations – the excitement of the discoveries, the conflicts with ‘professional’ archaeologists and the forced abandonment of work when the war broke out. At the visitor centre/museum there are displays that explain the huge amount of work that went into the original manufacture of some of the finds, tell you about anglo-saxon life, and show some of the finds from later excavations (including the grave of a rider and his horse, buried with the accoutrements – sword, spears, shield – that showed him to be a warrior of importance). They have even got a section here about the 2021 Netflix movie ‘The Dig’ that dramatised the story with Carey Mulligan as Edith Pretty and Ralph Fiennes playing Basil Brown.
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