It’s a cold afternoon in the dying embers of November, and the Suffolk countryside is beginning to embrace winter. The paths that traverse the gentle slopes of Sutton Hoo are wet underfoot, their stony surfaces made unhelpfully slippery by a combination of autumn leaf mulch and the general dampness of the air.
There is even a veil of mist that lingers close to the grass, beyond the hills of the Royal Burial Ground, where the land slides down through the trees to the wide bend of the River Deben. And the pale end-of-year daylight plays a role, slanting inwards through the increasingly bare branches.
Cross your eyes – and, with the angle of the sun, I to have holding my hand to my face – and you might think you’re in another time. But to the low grumble of a tractor on the farm next door it could easily be the seventh century – and all quiet on the East Anglian front.
It’s so quiet that I have the place to myself. Almost. Apart from a retired couple walking their dog through this perfect pastoral landscape, there is no one else here. Actually a remarkable situation. For there is a growing argument that Sutton Hoo is Britain’s most important ancient site; a crucial piece of the past that tells a vivid story about our country and shines a torch on the undocumented gloom of the so-called Dark Ages.
It’s a story – of Anglo-Saxon warlords carving out new kingdoms on the far edges of a changing Europe – that continues to unfold. Just this summer, an archaeological dig in nearby Rendlesham has uncovered something astonishing: the alleged remains of a temple used by the kings of East Anglia.
This tirelessly beautiful village is thought to have been their seat of power. Sutton Hoo, just four miles to the south-west along the A1152, was their graveyard. An important chapter in the history of the Dark Age shimmers in the light.
“[The site] is similar to buildings elsewhere in England that are seen as temples or cult houses,” Professor Christopher Scull of University College London told The Telegraph last month. ‘Perhaps it was used for pre-Christian worship by the early kings of the East Angles. The results of these excavations at Rendlesham speak vividly to the power and wealth of the East Anglian kings – and the sophistication of the society they ruled.”
This is of course not the first time that a discovery here has caused excitement. Sutton Hoo originally made headlines in the summer of 1938, when the site’s owner – the recently widowed magistrate Edith Pretty – enlisted local amateur archaeologist Basil Brown to see if he could solve the mystery of the gigantic earth mounds at the southern end of the area. dissolve. her property.
It did not take long for Brown to determine that the largest of these man-made mounds contained the metal remains of what had once been a large seagoing vessel. A ship of which a careful estimate yielded a length of 27 meters. A ship in which a king was buried.
The events of that very English dig – very soon senior figures from the Ipswich Museum, Cambridge University and the British Museum would become involved, before the Second World War was interrupted – is story enough in itself. So much so that it was made into a movie in 2021, The Dig, starring Ralph Fiennes as Basil Brown, and Carey Mulligan breathing emotion into the sad story of Edith Pretty, who would die just four years later.
But the bigger story is the one that – at that point – had been hidden for 1,300 years. And as I approach it along those slippery November paths, I can see it without any problem.
Although the Royal Cemetery has been returned to nature to some extent since the various excavations – stretching behind a fence like a kind of unkempt pasture – its shape and scale are immediately visible to the naked eye. It is hill two that you come to first: a large earthen swelling, which tells you that you have reached the cemetery.
There are 18 such mounds in total – including the main one, Mound One, which waits just ahead. It’s best seen via the climb of 81 steps to the top of the observation tower that rises in the far southern corner of the property – a clever addition to the Sutton Hoo site that was installed in 2021.
From here the picture is even clearer. To date, only three Anglo-Saxon ship graves have been discovered in Britain. All three were found in Suffolk. The first emerged from an excavation at Snape Common, near Aldeburgh, in 1862. The other two are directly below you, in the two largest mounds of Sutton Hoo.
From the observation deck you can appreciate the effort it entails. Behind the tower is the slope, the land slopes down to the Deben. The boats would have to be towed – by rope, hand and sinew – up that same riverbank, while warriors did their duty, the veins in their necks bulging, the sweat beading on the Anglo-Saxon eyebrows.
It would also have been a great honor. Especially in the case of Mound One. There is no exact evidence for the identity of the king who was buried here; the acidic soil of Suffolk had devoured his remains for centuries before Basil Brown broke into his grave.
But analysis of coins found within the perimeter of the ship has narrowed the burial to a time frame of 610-635 AD. suggest – point to one man: Raedwald from East Anglia.
Here was a ruler to whom wealth and power clung. Although written more than 200 years after his reign, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – one of the most important sources on the events of Dark-Age Britain – calls him a Bretwalda; a ‘British king’. This is supported by the works of the Venerable Bede, the monk-historian who lived (672-735) much closer to the time of Raedwald, and wrote of the triumph of the East Anglian monarch at the Battle of the River Idle ( in modern times). Nottinghamshire) around 617.
This was a seismic battle; a victory over Aethelfrith of Northumbria. And although it came at a personal cost for Raedwald – his son Raegenhere was murdered that day – the East Anglian was able to conquer the lands that belonged to the Northumbrian crown and place his vassal Edwin on the throne.
Bede gives us more information – that Raedwald ruled East Anglia between (approximately) 599 and his death in 624; that he was the first East Anglian king to convert to Christianity, probably in 605. But his supposed tomb adds color and shade to the words on the page.
The bronze helmet found in fragments next to where the body is said to have lain – now carefully reconstructed and on display in the British Museum – is an artefact of inestimable value. It celebrates expert craftsmanship at a time when Britain is said to have retreated from the high standards of the Roman centuries; partly a pragmatic armor that would have provided real protection during battle, partly a decorated quasi-crown with dragon motif, the ornateness of which was designed to show the royal status of the wearer.
Nor was he alone in the grave. There was a sword, the blade with the pattern still in its sheath. There was a gold buckle of astonishing complexity, and a wallet cover for a money pouch of a similar hand-forged marvel. And there were objects that spoke of deep-rooted trade links – a set of ten silver bowls from the Byzantine Empire, far away on the other side of the Mediterranean; a pair of silver spoons from the same region.
Other precious pieces were unearthed in 2000 when initial preparatory work for the new visitors center revealed a second burial site – in which a sixth-century bronze drinking vessel was found, decorated with Syrian or Nubian friezes of naked warriors in battle. A message on it, in ancient Greek font, reads: “Use this in good health, Master Count, for many happy years.”
It seems that the dead can speak in what they have left behind. And at Sutton Hoo they talk of a Dark Age Britain, not closed off from the world on its own stagnant island, but open to mainland Europe and the Middle East; connected and in conversation with both.
In fact, it is no exaggeration to describe the Sutton Hoo Hills as “the pyramids of Britain”; tombs that have filled gaps in our knowledge long, long after the powerful men – and, in the case of Mound 14, women – buried therein were lost from memory.
With the new archaeological discoveries at Rendlesham, has Sutton Hoo eclipsed Stonehenge to become Britain’s most important ancient site? Maybe. And maybe not. It depends, among other things, on how you define ‘old’. At its peak well over a century after the fall of Rome, Sutton Hoo is at the extreme end of the term; the noble blocks of Stonehenge, which were (probably) piled high on the Salisbury Plain sometime between 2600 and 2400 BC, are clearly prehistoric.
You could say that even comparing the two is a case of apples and oranges; that a gap of three millennia makes such discussions meaningless. But where Wiltshire’s main landmark is plagued by overtourism and the rumble of traffic on the A303 just yards away, Sutton Hoo retains an air of mystery while revealing more and more secrets.
What will come next? Further research will certainly shed light on whether the Rendlesham site is the temple of Raedwald with altars to both the old pagan gods and the ‘new’ Christian gods as described by Bede. And there is no correct answer to the question of who was in Hill Two (Raedwald’s son Raegen, who died in battle, is one possibility). But whatever the soil of Suffolk produces, the story will continue, a distant era leaking into ours.
Essentials
Tickets for Sutton Hoo (01394 389 700) cost from £15 per adult. In winter the museums are only open on weekends; the entire site is open all year round.