The Staffordshire Hoard

I am really thrilled as Cheshire sister has just phoned to tell me that the recently discovered Staffordshire Hoard is going to be on display in the Potteries Museum in Stoke on Trent from 13th February until 7th March.

I am planning our visit.

The Staffordshire Hoard website   has 659 Photos are of the artefacts .I have chosen to download this picture of a strip of gold,with the inscription from Numbers Ch. 10 v 35 and reads:

"Surge domine et dissipentur inimici tui et fugiant qui oderunt te a facie tua", equivalent to:

"Rise up O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate the be driven from thy face." 

This could be the beginning of an Orthodox prayer suggests one of the comments on the Flickr site hosting the pics. You may download pictures from the 'portableantiqities' Flickr pages as long as they and all the partners in the 'Staffordshire Hoard' project get credit for them . Of course they do. The pictures are all fantastic. The website shows just how far Open Source benefits the user and the creator.

It has to be one of the best presentations I have ever seen promoting anything, since my love affair with the Sparklehorse website a few years ago.

I have just found my handbook to the Sutton Hoo Ship Burial. It says '1968 Margaret Bruce 'inside and  my 'Early Medieval Designs Pattern Book' 1995. They are going on my bedside table next to my Thomas a Kempis, Derek Prince and my current detective novel (gruesome Swedish and rather good). I shall sleep tonight thinking of curly patterns, border patterns, my trips to Iona and Lindisfarne, and the Lilla Cross on the North Yorkshire Moors .

As coincidence would have it , a new series has just started up this evening on BBC1-one of the Dimblebys having a trip round the world looking at artefacts showing that these fair isles were a cradle of World Art History. To be fair I had no idea that the earliest surviving  Complete  Bible the Codex Amiantinus ( Vulgate) housed in a Florentine library had actually been written in Wearmouth or Jarrow.  A facsimile may be seen in Sunderland . I am going there too. Seeing the  electronic copy of the Lindisfarne gospels for the first time was a revelation. You can do this at home now on the 'Turning the pages 'facility on the British Libraries website. Oh , I am so not going to be bored.

I have dug around in the garden here for nearly 20 yrs. I have found bits of old pocket watches, clay pipes, lots of nails, a cat skeleton, and bits of what might be horse harnesses. No flithers, no Roman tiles, lots of shards of domestic Victorian and Edwardian pottery are all I have to offer.