Hello and welcome to Sutton Hoo the famous Anglo-Saxon royal burial ground
recently immortalised in the Netflix film The Dig.
At the moment we're only open to local visitors but I'm here to give you
a personal guided tour so you can enjoy Sutton Hoo from wherever you are in the world.
Well we're in Tranmer House now and this was the home of Mrs Pretty
and in 1937 she got into conversation with a local historian about some mounds which she could see from the house
and they decided that maybe it would be interesting to get these excavated.
The Ipswich Museum recommended their excavator Basil Brown, so Mrs Pretty employed Basil Brown to come out and start investigating the mounds in 1938.
He came back in 1939 and that's when the big discoveries were made.
And now of course you can stay in Tranmer House. Upstairs are several holiday flats,
from the house you can look out to the mounds and see where Basil Brown did his famous excavation.
Sutton Hoo, well I'd say it's the biggest archaeological discovery ever made in this country
so it is an immense responsibility to look after the site but also really what we're trying to do at Sutton Hoo is tell more people about it.
You're now in the middle of the royal burial ground at Sutton Hoo.
The mounds you can see each have a member of the East Anglian Anglo-Saxon royal family
buried underneath them but the famous one is the one behind me.
Now you have to take yourself back to the spring and summer of 1939,
the weather was very beautiful, not like today, now they started on this side of the mound
and within a few days one of the workers shouted to Basil and said he'd found something.
Basil pushed him aside and started digging with his trowel and instantly identified a rusted rivet
which had held together the planks of a ship. He also realised that this rivet was still in its original position
and very carefully, day by day, Basil and his team excavated into the mound getting deeper and deeper.
The ship was getting wider and wider until they came to the centre of the mound where Basil observed
a bigger dark stain and he could see little green coppery stains within that, and he realised he'd found the burial chamber.
This mound hadn't been robbed.
Charles Phillips who was then at Cambridge University, heard about it and he came out to look
and then was absolutely gobsmacked, to use a modern phrase, to see this huge excavation of this massive ship
so that's when Charles Phillips and his team took over the excavation.
Of course everybody knew that war was coming so they were working at great speed. Basil Brown concentrated on excavating the ship
which is 27 metres long so that's a massive excavation task on its own, while Charles Phillips and his team focused on the burial chamber.
For the British Museum the Sutton Hoo ship buriel is one of our most iconic collections.
It's something that people travel from all over the world to come and see
so of course we have the incredible helmet, which is one of four complete metal helmets
that survive from Anglo-Saxon England and there's an amazing collection of eastern Mediterranean silver
that has travelled all the way from the Byzantine empire. We have shield mounts and sword mounts from a sword harness
and shoulder clasps which are really quite technical achievements
so in the 80 years since the Sutton Hoo ship burial was discovered it's really gone on to transform
our understanding of the Anglo-Saxon period in Britain.
We've learned that this was not a dark age, this is actually a period of time that that was really incredible
in terms of the craftsmanship that was possible, in terms of the international connections that these people enjoyed,
and it's it's something that we really didn't have before the Sutton Hoo ship burial was discovered .
In the grave in mound one are some of the most beautiful objects ever created .
I don't think that's a an exaggeration. This is a replica of the great gold buckle ,
so this is a a belt buckle, the front of it is beautifully decorated with interlaced animals.
Now some people might describe this as Celtic design. It's not Celtic, it's Anglo-Saxon.
What you see here of course is the landscape that the Anglo-Saxons knew.
This is exactly the same landscape that they had, so when you stand up on the mounds you see really what they would have seen
and you can walk literally in the footsteps of those Anglo-Saxon people. This is their landscape.
We're back outside the visitor centre again and behind me you can see a sculpture of the ship
which gives you some idea of the scale of the thing and also how it might have looked when it was on the water .
Now I hope you've enjoyed your little tour with me and maybe when times are back to normal again
you'll come and visit Sutton Hoo because your support helps us look after places like this.