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In 1782, a Later Bronze Age bronze pin with, unusually, a bronze ring threaded on to its stem, was found in Knockglass townland near Ballinameen, Co. Roscommon. Very soon it came into the possession of the local Ouseley family, and William Ouseley drew it, along with other artefacts and antiques, in his Commonplace Book, which is now in the National Library of Ireland.
This arrangement of items is extremely rare: there are only three certain examples of Later Bronze Age pins with rings threaded on the stem, and even after 40 years’ research I know of only three other possible examples (for further detail, see my articles in the Sligo Field Club Journal for 2023 and for 2024). In addition to the Knockglass discovery, the certain examples are a pin with two rings on the stem, found in 1868 at Trillick, Co. Tyrone; while a similar combination, recovered by Brendan Coll in 1969 from Annagh Bog, near Castlerea, Co. Roscommon, was brought to me by a First Year pupil, Sharon O’Leary, in 1980 when I was teaching mathematics at Castlerea Secondary School. The Trillick find is now in the Ashmolean Museum and its counterpart from Annagh is in the National Museum of Ireland. The present location of the Knockglass pin, however, is unknown.
How did it come to disappear? By 1789, William’s father Ralph Ouseley (a collector and antiquarian) had moved to Limerick where he established a private museum. After Ralph’s death in 1803, though, the Ouseley Collection was transferred to England where it came into the keeping of his grandson Sir Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley. A noted composer and Professor of Music (1855-1889) at the University of Oxford, Frederick went on to set up St Michael’s College Choral School in Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire, and it is there that his family’s antiquities collection was housed – until it was unceremoniously discarded by a new headmaster in 1920.
From the scraps that we have gleaned about these objects, they could have been consigned to a quarry at the school, or they might be anywhere in the Tenbury Wells area – in a field, in a display case, or even unrecognised in a museum. We have some clues, however. We know that a Choral School pupil brought three axes and a spearhead into Winchester Museum in 1937, although the museum did not retain the objects, nor make a note of the pupil’s name. A decade later, Lilly Chitty’s report for the Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club mentioned an Irish halberd as well as ‘a horse, an angel, arrowheads, ivory, and so forth’ found by a schoolboy in a disused quarry at Netherwood, north-east Herefordshire. These sound very like some of the other objects in the Commonplace Book. It is also possible that the ring could have become separated from the pin at any time after it was recorded by William Ouseley.
Most positively, an Iron Age horse- bit from the Ouseley Collection was recently recognised in England and (as reported in Archaeology Ireland in 2023) has been returned to the National Museum of Ireland – so clearly all is not lost. In publishing this note, we hope that an antiques collector or dealer, or a local museum, might be aware of some of these items, and from there we might be able to track back to where others may still wait to be found. Any information can be sent to me at martin.timoney06@gmail.com, or to Dr Neil Wilkin at the British Museum or Matthew Seaver at the National Museum of Ireland, and will be greatly appreciated.
Images: courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, from William Ouseley’s Commonplace Book, 1788-1790, National Library of Ireland MS 5905
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