The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial
Treasures of a British Anglo-Saxon king that illuminated Dark Age history, and the people who discovered them.
On the cusp of World War 2, a widowed landowner employed a penniless self-taught astronomer and archaeologist to investigate the mounds 500 yards from her house. In the process, the two changed history.
Considering the people concerned in this academia-breaking archaeological excavation, I am surprised it took so long for the movie industry to pay attention. The Dig (2021), based on the 2007 faction novel by John Preston, refocused interest in the Dark Age history of the British Isles.
Even in England’s renowned green and pleasant land, it doesn’t look like much: a cluster of grassy mounds on a spur of land (the hoo) high above the River Deben in the county of Suffolk. But were the softly rising mounds in pasture land 95 miles north-east of London the deciding factor in the purchase of the Sutton Hoo estate by newly-wed Frank and Edith Pretty?
Edith Pretty had been born into a wealthy Yorkshire industrialist family, the Dempsters. She had been educated at Roedean and in…
