Lost Hoard of Viking Silver from Cave Hill, Belfast

Following up from the article on gold diggers and their exploits an article from C S Briggs printed in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology,26 1983 p152-3

At the sale of the Carruthers collecton of antiquities in 1856, two silver armlets were sold. One derived from the Magheralagan hoard (Briggs and Graham-Campbell 1976; Briggs 1978), the other was described as a 'portion of a silver armlet, ornamented but flattened', and was stated to have been' found at Cave Hill, Co Antrim' (Sotheby, Wilkinson and Co., 20th December 1856, p.8, no. 128). It was purchased by Eastwood, a dealer, for three shillings.
This piece is almost indubitably the same fragment as that illustrated in John Windele's MS Antiquarian Miscellany (R.I.A. MS 12.C.1., fol.133) stated simply to have been 'found near Belfast, 1845', and recently listed as a provenanced though unassociated Hiberno-Viking find by Graham-Campbell (1976,71). This weighed sixteen pennyweight (Fig.1). The only other reference to Carruthers's ownership of this half armring appears in the Belfast Exhibition Catalogue of 1852 (Descriptive Catalogue of the Collection of Antiquities, Belfast, 1852, p.18, no.2) where, most informatively, it is described as having been 'found together with an ingot of silver, in McAirt's Fort, Cavehill, Co. Antrim'. No further details were forthcoming from the same source; certainly no other exhibitor admitted to owning a find provenanced to the Fort, and no other contemporary source helps pinpoint the whereabouts of the accompanying ingot. Indeed, it is possible that this, together with other hacksilver from the discovery was melted down by a local jeweller.
One piece which did not find its way into the melting pot was a full Hiberno-Viking armring acquired by Alexander Colville Welsh of Dromore, Co. Down. Acquired by the National Museum in 1876 (24,115) the ring is stated to have been 'found at the Corn Hill, Belfast' (Boe 1940, 127; Graham-Campbell 1976, 71). It is described as 'a little enlarged towards the middle. the opening is now wide, the ends a little damaged. Ornamented with a cross and transverse grooves containing in regular alternation raised crosses and dots' (Boe 1940, 127). Its decoration (Pl.1) is of a similar punched pattern to that upon the Windele illustration (Fig.1).
There is no such place as 'Corn Hill' in the Belfast area and it seems reasonable to conjecture that this is a mistranscription of 'Cave Hill'. Carruthers and Welsh were contemporaries who moved in the same antiquarian circle, and must have shared certain of their sources of supply. It is thus hardly surprising to find artefacts from the same cache turning up in the collections of both men. It is perhaps more surprising that other provenanced pieces, including the ingot, were not also incorporated into these or other local collections, and exhibited alongside the armring fragment at Belfast in 1852. One reason why the objects did not appear together could be that Welsh did not then own the armring, and that someone other than Carruthers was in possession of the lion's share of the treasure at the time. Welsh may thus only have acquired his one piece later. It is otherwise odd that he did not exhibit it in Belfast at the 1852 exhibition, since virtually everything he owned seems to have been on view to the public at that time. 
Antiquarian sources therefore indicate the certain association of one armring fragment with a silver ingot, and the liklihood of an associated full armring. These comprised either the whole or, more likely, a portion of a Hiberno-Viking silver hoard, only the second with hacksilver from Co. Antrim. In NE. Ireland Viking hoards predominate, there being five, plus one of ornaments and coin (Magheralagan), over two exclusively of hacksilver (Graham-Campbell 1976, 43-5).
C.S. Briggs
Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The writer thanks Mrs B. Dolan and Miss E. O'Tuomey of the Library, the Royal Irish Academy, for their constant help in his manuscript researches; also the Royal Irish Academy for permission to publish the Windele drawing. Mr J. Sheehan of the national Museum of Ireland kindly provided details of Welsh's specimen, and the national Museum gave permission to publish the photograph.

REFERENCES
Boe, J. (1940). Viking Antiquities in Great Britain and Ireland, Shetelig, H. (ed.), part III, Norse Antiquities in Ireland (Oslo, 1940).
Briggs, C.S. (1978). 'The Magheralagan Hoard; an additional note', Ulster j. Archaeol., 41 (1978), 102.---------and Graham-Campbell, J.A. (1976). 'A lost hoard of Viking-age silver from Magheralagan, County Down', Ulster J. Archeol., 39 (1976), 20-4
Graham-Campbell, J.A. (1976). 'The Viking Age silver hoards of Ireland' in Almqvist, B. and Greene, D. (eds), Proc. Seventh Viking Cong. (Dublin, 1976) 39-74

A interesting article on armrings said to be found in Scotland exhibit remarkable similarity to those described above  http://mycoinpage.com/SCA/ArmRings/Scottish_ArmRings.pdf

Gold Diggers on Cave Hill

C.Stephen Briggs mentions an interesting account of gold mania on the Cave Hill in the 1840s in
ANTIQUITIES OF THE CAVE HILL, BELFAST, AN ANTIQUARIAN NOTE
Ulster Journal of Archaeology, Vol 60, 2001

In the Mining Journal for 1846 (Anon 1846,530) there appears an interesting narrative under the title Gold Mines in Ulster. Its text runs:
Sir R. Kinahan (1) has written a large volume regarding the resources of Ireland but we believe he overlooked its gold mines, or seemed to consider them of only minor importance. 'The enterprise of Belfast', has, however, gone in advance of the worthy knight's speculations; and amongst the wonders of the Cavehill, it appears that some persons have supposed that gold is included. One individual recently had a vision of a bedstead of gold, and three statues of the same precious metal, snugly laid up there, ever since the Danish invasion, by the marauders, on their retreat. Then another person, in some distant quarter of the globe, on the same night, at the same hour, had a similar dream which he communicated, per first mail, to his Irish correspondents: who, activated by a very laudable desire to increase the resources of the country, and meet the threatened deficiency in bullion, employed three or four men to dig in the indicated spot, McCart's Fort (sic), for the hidden treasure.
Of course, if there were a golden bedstead to be found, there must be other valuable chamber furniture in the neighbourhood, such as golden ewers and various odds and ends of that description. And if the statues of the illustrious kings were cut in gold, the pedestals must have consisted of very precious marble. In fact, there was no end, at least in the imagination of the visionary, to the riches which might be found. Young Ireland was to be gratified by the glory of the old bedposts, and the searchers by their value at £31.17s 6d per oz. For 10 or 14 days, even in the stormiest weather, three or four individuals left their employment and handled pick and shovel with surprising vigour and perseverance, until they formed a major and minor pit on the highest pinnacle of the Cave Hill. The largest mine is carried down 24ft (c8 m), and measures to 18 ft (c6 m) in diameter. We are sorry to state, that hitherto nothing more valuable has been reached than solid rock.

This account helps to explain the site's present condition aand poses questions about finds which might have at one point been attributed to it. Curiously, the account does not relate contemporary interest or activity to the origins or use of the cave (illustrated in Bazley 2002), excavated into the vertical face of the outcropping basalt some distance below the fort.
MacArt's Fort, a much eroded and arguably overvisited embanked promontory fort of unknown (though probably early medieval) age , lies on a spectacularly high point of the Cave Hill ( at 368 m OD) in Ballyaghagan townland, Co Antrim (IGR J3250 7960) overlooking Belfast Lough. Although today a well known landmark, and apparently a place where 'Sunday fairs were held in the last century' (Bazley 2002), little is known of its history or the reasons for delvings or hollows apparently cut into the local bedrock which currently hinder a better interpretation of its geomorphology and archaeology. One hollow is sketched as a V-shaped depression on the section across the fort made in undated field notes by the late Estyn Evans. Evans indicated on the plan 'here by entrance is a circular pit 10 (paces) across'. This hollow, still very much in evidence today, is presumably the larger of the two 19th-century 'gold pits' to which the anonymous account refers.
As regards contemporary artefact discoveries, in James Carruthers' antiquarian cabinet at Downpatrick around 1850 there were two or three silver ornaments and possibly also a coin, all supposedly from the Cave Hill (Briggs 1983). Rumour, or some unknown contemporary printed account of their discovery, could have helped motivate this mining venture or may even have resulted from it. And since the date Carruthers' artefacts were discovered remains uncertain, an open mind must be kept on the matter. Marketable commodities like Viking silver could have been found elsewhere; the Cave Hill provenance, at that time a topical findspot, may have been invoked through its vendor's hope of facilitating a credible sale.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The writer gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Mrs Anne Given, Environment and Heritage Service, Dept of the Environment, for making the Evans notes available and for providing information from the Sites and Monuments Record.
NOTE
1. Kinehan is named in error for Robert Kane, whose book, The Industrial Resources of Ireland appeared in two editions, 1844 and 1845. Kane was knighted in 1846 (DNB). Kinahan was an important contemporary geoplogist and an accomplishe field archaeologist, who mush later was to publish a Geology of Ireland (in 1878). It is obviously relevant to this discussion that during the 1840s he was involved in mapping for official Geological Memoirs, sometimes in important mining regions.
REFERENCES
Anon 1846 'Gold mines in Ulster', Mining Journal 1846, 530
Bazley, A P 2002 'Walking with imagination', magazine of he Geologists' Association 1, No 4 (2002), 11.
Briggs, C S 1983 'A lost hoard of Viking age silver from Cave Hill, Belfast,' UJA 26 (1983), 152-3.
Kane, R 1844 The Industrial Resources of Ireland, Dublin (2nd edn 1845; repr Shannon 1971).