An Historic Find

Many years ago my brother Peter and I found a very interesting bronze key on one of our regular metal detecting trips to the Yorkshire Dales. It was in the years before the Portable Antiquities Scheme but we reported it to medieval specialist Kevin Leahy who then worked at the Scunthorpe Museum. Last year when I retired and found the time to go detecting again I reported all my decent finds to Dot Boughton at Lancaster Museum and she recorded them under the PAS. I was a little surprised to get a phone call from The Westmorland Gazette a few weeks ago asking me all about the key. It seems that despite it being recorded last summer they had just picked it up as a local find and wanted to write an article about it. I explained that it was found many years ago and wasn't recent news but I happily provided answers to their reporter. 


Today my Twitter feed suddenly started to go mad - well I got three tweets in quick succession, that's mad for me. All were congratulating me and linking to this article


The reporter has covered my answers fairly well (although I did say that I found two links from a Roman bracelet and not a whole bracelet). However, the photo of the key accompanying the article was not a photo of the key that we found. Here's how Dot reported my key.

The photo of a spectacular key found in Suffolk below my somewhat inferior artifact clearly states that it is a similar item but the newspaper managed to get it wrong. So it wasn't much of a news story really; a report of a key found twenty years ago with a photo of a completely different one. Oh well five minutes of fame I suppose but I do wish that they had got it right.