Remember when you were a kid and you’d brew up an adventure by going on imaginary quests in your backyard. My personal favorite imaginary adventure would always involve treasure, preferably buried treasure that required a secret map to find it. Then this event called growing up happened, and you stopped looking for buried treasure. Well, some people may grow up, but they never stop looking. Rachel Hall is one of those people. Her idea of adventure is digging in the dirt; she’s an archeologist, and she just led an expedition where they found—you guessed it—buried treasure.
There is so much beauty in the world, parts of it must be viewed from a mountaintop…
Episode Two – The Wilderness Episodes – Colin Prior
…while other parts of it must be unearthed from their hiding spots.
Rachel didn’t have to travel around the world to an exotic location to find it either, in a way, she dug it up while playing in her back yard. 26 coins were dug up in her homeland of the United Kingdom. This isn’t the first time buried treasure has been dug up on in the U.K., but it is the first time they were ever discovered inside a cave. (Images of Tom Sawyer’s quest come to mind only with an Oliver Twist twist seeing as the treasure is in Britain and not America.) The ancient coins, a collection of silver and gold, belonged to the Corieltauvi tribe, but the cave they were found in, Reynard’s Kitchen Cave, is outside their known territory.
Now, the Corieltauvi existed before the Roman takeover of what is now Britain, yet the coins are a cocktail of different currencies spanning several time periods, including Roman coins. This is apparently common, seeing that despite changes of currency, money is still money (especially when it’s silver and gold) and no one would have stopped using good coin just because it’s stamped wrong.
The total haul of these 26 coins equates to almost $3,500 USD, making it quite the find, good enough to be labeled as “treasure,” which means it can’t be immediately taken for private collection, but instead must be held out for any museums’ considerations. It just goes to show, an adventure for buried treasure isn’t just for kids and pirates in stories, it can actually pay off in real life. I’m grabbing my shovel and dusting off the old charts right now.
