When two carefully-packaged Bronze Age axe heads arrived in the post at the National Museum of Ireland one day in June, accompanied by a letter saying that they were discovered in Co Westmeath using a metal detector, the museum wanted to know more details – who sent the artefacts? Where in Co Westmeath were they found? Why were they packaged in a porridge box? So they made a public appeal for the person who found the axe heads to come forward. The mystery piqued the interest of the likes of the New York Times, the BBC and others.
The man responsible for the find is farmer Thomas Dunne, from Coralstown, Co Westmeath and he spoke to Philip Boucher Hayes on Today with Claire Byrne about how he came to accidentally discover the axe heads:
"We were cutting silage in a field here and a bit fell off – with a mower – and we lost a bit off the mower. A bit of steel and we were afraid it went into the silage harvester. We got a man just to look for a piece of steel and we found these yokes under a big row of beech trees."
They didn't realise what they’d found – because why would they? – and guessed they were just bits of scrap. So they threw them back into the ditch. Philip wondered if they’d cut silage in that area of the field before or if this was the first time. No, Thomas says, they’ve been cutting silage at the same spot for about 30 years.
The man that Thomas got to search for the bit that broke off the mower used a metal detector, which is how he came across the axe heads. Now, it’s actually against the law in Ireland to search for archaeological objects using a metal detector, but that wasn’t the intention of the search, so presumably no charges will be forthcoming. Anyway, what, Philip wanted to know, did either of the two men think the find was?
"I knew it wasn’t what I was looking for and I didn’t think a whole lot of them, 'cause they all looked to me like a bit of scrap. I thought it might be a bit of an old horse plough or some bits of steel that were lost years ago when farmers would be ploughing with horses or something like that."
A decent enough theory, let’s face it. And far more likely than a 4,000-year-old archaeological artefact. But the man with the metal detector thought it might be something out of the ordinary:
"He just thought it was unusual and he just brought it home and he just said he’d send it off then after a while."
It was about six weeks before Thomas found out on RTÉ News what the find consisted of and that the museum were trying to trace who had sent it to them. He made contact with them then and they came to see where the axe heads had been found:
"I couldn’t believe it when they came out to my field."
And what about the possibility that there might be more hidden artefacts buried under that field in Coralstown?
"I’d say there’s – it’s only a big green silage field, like there’s no monuments or anything near it at all, you know, it just looks an ordinary field."
Chances are though, Philip says, there could be an entire village under that silage field. Thomas isn’t convinced:
"I don’t know. All I see under is water, a lot of the place."
No possibility of a Céide Fields scenario unfolding in Co Westmeath then? And in another 4,000 years people might just come across the broken piece of the mower that sparked the search in the first place and has yet to be found.
You can hear Philip’s full chat with Thomas by clicking above.