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The Herefordshire Viking Hoard: unpicking the story of a stolen treasure

Last year, four men were jailed for stealing and selling one of the most significant Viking hoards ever found in western Britain. To date, only a few of its contents have been recovered. What can these objects, and the landscape in which they were buried, tell us about the area’s early medieval history? Tim Hoverd, Peter Reavill, Judy Stevenson, and Gareth Williams report.

OPPOSITE Sark’s connectivity is summed up in this image of a figure standing at the southern end of the island looking north west to Guernsey on the horizon. Barry Cunliffe believes that Sark might have been one of the many sacred islands along the Atlantic interface that Strabo wrote about at the end of the 1st century BC. BELOW Sheer cliffs rise steeply on every side, home to many seabirds. The gently undulating plain is fertile, well watered and extensively cultivated. Between the cliffs and the fields, the ‘skirt’ lands were traditionally used for sheep grazing.

Sark: the unexplored isle – investigating millennia of isolation and connectivity

Even today, getting to the Channel Island of Sark is an adventure, involving a 55-minute journey by sea from Guernsey, and then a climb from the quay through a tunnel in the rock to reach the top of the sheer cliffs that surround the island on all sides. Given the challenges of getting to Sark, the island provides the perfect opportunity to study connectivity and isolation down the ages – one of Sir Barry Cunliffe’s perennial preoccupations, sparking his excavations there. Who came here, when, and why? And what does it tell us about the mobility of past visitors? Chris Catling reports.