The Galloway Hoard is the richest collection of rare and unique Viking Age objects ever found in Britain or Ireland. Buried around AD 900, the hoard brings together a stunning variety of materials and treasures from Ireland, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and as far away as Asia. This was a time when, following Alfred the Great’s victories over the Danes, the Anglo-Saxon king’s successors were laying the foundations of medieval England, and when, further north, the Kingdom of Alba was emerging. Galloway, where the hoard was found, was once part of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria. On the western coast of southern Scotland, it has easy connections across the Irish Sea. But as the Galloway Hoard’s remarkable contents show, those links stretched much further than Ireland.
Discovered by a metal-detectorist in 2014 on what is now Church of Scotland land, the hoard was saved for the nation by National Museums Scotland in 2017 after a major fundraising campaign. Since then, curators and conservators have been working to clean, preserve, and understand the Hoard. The results to date are shown in a new exhibition, Galloway Hoard: Viking-age Treasure, currently on display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, and touring to Kirkcudbright Galleries and Aberdeen Art Gallery thereafter.
Uncovering the hoard’s secrets has been, and still is, a multi-layered process, and the exhibition offers the first chance to see newly revealed details that have been hidden for a millennium.
