It does make you wonder what else has been thrown not knowing what the object is.
It certainly does Paul, not sure if I've posted this tale on DW.com before and if I have then I apologise, but here we are.
As the old saying goes “All that glitters is not gold” which as we know is very true but the reverse is also true, and I thought I better let you know.......
Back in 1984 I found 18 grams of what was probably Celtic gold, Why probably? Well it didn't look like gold, not at first at least. And where did I find it? To this day I still don't know. It was either Portskewett in the mud or Llanmadoc beach on the Gower.
Back in those days as I still do, I take most of the rubbish and dross I find home to either consign it to the bin or one of my scrap buckets at a later date. On one particular occasion I hadn't emptied out the ammo pouch I used for my “ruff stuff” for some time and so decided to lighten the load and sort it out.
Going through the usual lead, cartridge caps and ring pulls one piece of “lead” caught my eye as it looked for all the world like a big cat, tiger, panther etc. and so I put it to one side purely for this reason. A month or two had past when my then girlfriend asked if “I was going to do any thing with this grotty piece of old metal” (you know the speech) because my putting to one side was in fact the kitchen windowsill and she was fed up moving it.
And so for the second time my attention was drawn to it. It wasn't the usual greyish white colour of old lead, this piece was more black with tiny bits of sand almost stuck in to it, playing it through my fingers I decided to try and bend it.....nothing, no give at all, so I decided to just srubbishe the surface to see if I could tell what it was made of, as its weight told me it was lead and gold is inert and doesn't change “we all know that” don't we!!!!
Well you guessed it the colour that shone back at me was that dull yellow of 24 carrot gold.
Not long after this I made an appointment with the curator of the Newport museum in South Wales to see if he could shed some light on what it could be.
Suitably unimpressed with my find, which I suppose must happen when you are dealing every day with ancient treasures, he told me it was probably dross from a travelling gold smith.
Dross!!!!??? this was 18 grams of pure gold, what did he mean dross?
He then went on to explain that in the bronze age and even the early iron age, gold while always being priceless was at the same time worthless, there was no monetary system and even the early gold stater's were probably collected until they had enough to make an item of jewellery out of them. And so a little bit escaping along with the impurities would not of been looked on in the same light as it would be by you or I.
I contacted the coroner and to cut a long story short he decided it would not be worth taking it any further as it could not be dated and had not been worked.
I later had it made into two Celtic pendants, one for each of my daughters which they still wear to this day.
