Newspaper articles appearing in the Ilkley Gazette and The Times in the past few years took my thoughts back to a muddy field in October 1967. My family and I were crawling around on all fours trying to find coins about the size of an old 6-penny piece. It was before the time of helpful metal detectors!

The field in question, a couple of miles east of Darrington on the A1, belonged to my uncle and had been newly ploughed. One of his farmhands was walking across it to go home to the nearby village of Criddling Stubbs for his midday meal, when something caught his eye. He noticed a couple of small coins on the ground, which, on further inspection, were not any currency he recognised. He realised he’d better tell someone and local archaeologists got involved – their verdict was that he had found Roman coins!

Our endeavours in the field a couple of days later located a few more coins. I still have the one I found. When the archaeologists did a much more thorough investigation, they found a pot with about 3,300 Roman bronze coins in it. They dated from the 4th century AD and, according to the laws at that time, were not deemed to be “Treasure Trove”. It became known as The Criddling Stubbs Hoard. The remnants of the pot and several hundred of the coins are in Leeds City Museum and were on display in 2018 – hence the newspaper articles. As far as I know, other Yorkshire museums also have coins from this excavation.