Gold finds in Little Thetford
A Saxon pendent found on the track of the Roman Road, Akerman Way, in Little Thetford. It is described by T. C. Lethbridge in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, Vol. XLV1, 1953, ‘A Jewelled Saxon Pendant from the Isle of Ely’.It is made of rock crystal, gold, garnet and amethyst-coloured glass and was brought from a dealer by Mr Louis Clarke in 1951 and presented to the University of Archaeology and Ethnology, where it is now on display. It had been found in Little Thetford some years earlier in a ploughed field.
The pendant is a flattened disk bead of clear, colourless, rock crystal, 3 cm in diameter and 1 cm in thickness The crystal has been skilfully worked on a lathe. The bead is surrounded with a bar of gold. From this bar is a gold cross with four arms, ornamented in a herring-bone pattern, with small straight-sided garnets, set in cells of gold.Also along the track of the Roman Road Akerman Way, in Little Thetford, a piece of Bronze Age gold penannualar ring-money was found in 2007. It is now on display in Ely Museum.
Although not in the Parish of Little Thetford, just outside in Grunty Fen, a gold torc was found. It is a four-finger gold torc, twisted into a spiral, with plain long cone terminals soldered on. Dug up and said to be associated with three bronze palstaves. It is of Later Bronze age. Ref. Cambridge Antiquarian Society’s Communications, vol. xii, p. 96. The torc is on display in Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.It is about 10 cm long.