The moon dazzled me last night,
As I woke from dreams of Saxon warriors.
Swords and shores helmed deep
Across the years.
A ship sunk
In a low east hill
A helmet turns with the lunar tide.
Bodies and bone turned to sand
Empty caskets blank to the starry sky,
Warriors, lovers, beholders
Slip into their Earth.
A graveyard of ship sails and men
The tongue of a dragon whispers
And calls them from the depths
Of the river
To clear water on the other side.
(‘Sutton Hoo’ by Rachel Burch)
It was July 1937 when the first step, which led to one of the most extraordinary archaeological finds ever made in the UK, was taken at a flower show in the market-town of Woodbridge in Suffolk. Here it was that a wealthy widow named Edith Pretty happened on a local historian named Vincent Redstone. Pretty, who owned an estate named Sutton Hoo on the River Deben, had long been intrigued by a cluster of 18 ancient mounds on her property. Having travelled extensively, including around Egypt, in her early life, she had always been interested in archaeology and, when she and her husband Lieutenant-Colonel Pretty moved into Sutton Hoo House in 1926, they had talked about excavating the mounds but done nothing about it.
IMAGE: Larry Horricks/Netflix © 2021
So why did she decide to set the wheels in motion in 1938 when Britain was on the brink of war? Was it her interest in spiritualism (she regularly consulted a medium) that moved her to take action? There are stories that her friend had seen ghostly figures moving across the mounds; whether this spurred her on to investigate their origins no one knows. Whatever the reason, she felt compelled to dig deep into the past and to have the mounds excavated.
