Clay Moulds From the Blyth Hoard Fit Peebles Fittings

National Museums Scotland has been allocated the Blyth Hoard, a small Late Bronze Age cache found near Blyth Bridge in 2022. It holds two socketed axeheads, clay mould remains, and Scotland’s first complete copper ingot.

Dr Matthew Knight, senior curator of early prehistory at the museum, says those moulds appear to be cores for unique bronze fittings in the Peebles Hoard, found about 7 miles south-east by the same detectorist in June 2020.

He Stopped Digging at an Axehead

Mariusz Stępień was surveying ground near Blyth Bridge when his detector hit a 3,000-year-old socketed axehead. He could see more bronze in the soil and stopped. He called the Treasure Trove Unit, which sits at National Museums Scotland, instead of pulling the rest himself.

Museum archaeologists opened a small trench and found the metal inside an already old stone cairn. People in the Late Bronze Age had taken stones out, put the objects in, and covered them again. Beside a second socketed axehead sat a complete copper ingot, degraded clay mould material, and a layer of burnt matter. Knight dates the group to about 1150 to 800 BC.

On the two axeheads and the ingot, most of the original surfaces had already corroded away. Conservators cleaned what was left and consolidated it so the objects can be handled, studied, and shown. The mould clay was so fragile that the team used photogrammetry to build a 3D model of the hoard while it still sat in the ground, then tried to hold the clay with conservation materials.

FROM PEEBLES TO BLYTH

1. June 2020: Stępień finds unusual bronze near Peebles and reports it at once.
2. 2022: He finds a socketed axehead near Blyth Bridge, stops digging, and reports again.
3. May 2024: The Peebles Hoard is allocated to National Museums Scotland.
4. 2025: Conservators begin cleaning the Peebles pieces and record a tin-rich silver surface.
5. October 2026: The museum sets out the Blyth Hoard and the probable mould link.

The two finds sit two years apart on the calendar and about 7 miles apart on the map. That gap is short enough, Knight argues, to treat them as related work rather than two isolated lucky strikes.

Clay Cores for the Peebles Fittings

Finished bronze is common in Scotland. The clay and sand moulds that made it almost never are, because those materials rot in the ground. Knight records the remains of two, if not three, clay moulds or cores in the Blyth group, and he notes that more clay may once have been there.

Late Bronze Age moulds in Scotland are usually for swords, axeheads, and tools. These ones are not. They are incomplete, but they have a distinctive shape. Knight writes that they appear to represent the cores or models for bronze fittings from the Peebles Hoard, found in 2020 about 7 miles south-east, by the same finder.

This is one of those classic archaeological finds that initially doesn’t look like much, but is actually really incredible and has many stories to tell. It’s really rare for mould materials to survive at all, so it’s a special find in its own right, but the proximity and relationship to the Peebles Hoard makes it all the more extraordinary.

Dr Matthew Knight, senior curator of early prehistory, National Museums Scotland

It is rare, he adds, to find any Bronze Age moulds that can be tied to specific objects. Given how unusual the Peebles fittings are, he says it is highly probable that whoever buried the Blyth cache helped make some, or all, of those fittings. The ingot sitting with the clay makes that reading sharper: this looks like a maker’s kit, not a second display hoard.

CT scans of the Peebles block had already shown that some of those fittings were produced by lost-wax casting, a method that is scarce in Bronze Age Britain and points to skilled hands. If the Blyth clay really is the negative of those pieces, the Borders now hold both the product and part of the tool that formed it.

Where Did the Copper Come From?

The ingot is complete, and Knight says it is the first of its kind from Scotland. Ingots turn up more often in southern Britain, especially on the south coast. They have not been found north of the Border before. That, he writes, is evidence that raw metal was being brought into Scotland about 3,000 years ago, and that people here were not only melting down old objects.

Bronze Age metal could travel a long way. A seabed cargo off Salcombe in Devon, dated in overlapping Late Bronze Age bands, included hundreds of copper ingots and dozens of tin ingots, which shows how bulk metal moved along the south coast in this period. Knight is not claiming the Blyth lump came from that cargo. He is saying the Borders now have a piece of unused copper that can be tested.

Future work at National Museums Scotland will try to pin down where the copper was mined. If the chemical fingerprint matches metal in the Peebles fittings, or in the Blyth axeheads, the two sites stop being neighbours and start looking like one supply chain. If it does not match, the story changes again: a local caster using mixed stock, or an unfinished job.

Until those tests run, the ingot is a closed box. It is also the one object in the Blyth group that no Scottish find has offered before, which is why a cache that looks slight on a tray may matter more than its size suggests.

Tin Gave Bronze a Silver Sheen

The Peebles Hoard is the showpiece the Blyth clay appears to explain. Stępień found it in June 2020. The team wrapped the deposit and cut it out as a single block, then sent it to the University of Southampton’s µ-VIS X-ray Imaging Centre for CT scans before picking it apart in Edinburgh. Over five weeks they lifted more than 500 pieces and components from that block.

Among them is a complete Late Bronze Age sword still in a wooden scabbard. Bronze buttons remain looped on 3,000-year-old cords. Tiny pins, studs, and bosses still sit in wood or leather. Two rattle pendants, the first found in Scotland, match types better known from Denmark, northern Germany, and northern Poland, with two British cousins from Parc y Meirch in north Wales. They would have hung from a horse or a wooden vehicle and rattled as it moved.

The hoard was allocated to the museum in May 2024. Conservation began in 2025 and is due to run until 2028. Cleaning stripped dirt and green corrosion and exposed a silver-coloured surface on many objects, from a period when silver itself was not in use. X-ray fluorescence found high levels of tin at the surface. Knight says this is probably a deliberate enrichment, drawing tin up through the bronze, rather than plating or dipping.

TWO HOARDS, TWO JOBS

Bethan Bryan, the Peebles Hoard conservator, said the moment that silvery surface began to emerge felt like a secret coming up after 3,000 years. Knight said he has never seen a Bronze Age finish like it. “They almost glow.” In a world of golden bronze, the Peebles set would have looked like a different metal. The Blyth moulds are how that look may have been made, piece by piece, a few miles up the valley.

Buried in a Cairn Already Old

The Blyth objects were not dropped in open soil. They went into a stone cairn that was already ancient when the metal went in. Knight says the cairn may have been a special place, or it may have been used as a marker so someone could find the kit again. Somebody may have meant to come back for the moulds and the ingot and never did.

Excavation also found a layer of burnt material with the objects. Knight asks whether this was a place where moulds were being fired. Burnt matter can, by chance, help clay last. That would explain why any mould survives here when so few survive anywhere in Scotland, despite hundreds of known bronze objects.

Metalwork and manufacturing waste buried together is rare in Britain and, Knight writes, previously unknown in Scotland. The socketed axeheads and the ingot may themselves have been stock, waiting to be melted and poured into Peebles-style fittings. The person who buried the cache, in that reading, was a metalworker who could build moulds and cast from them.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The insertion: Stones were removed from an older cairn so the objects could be placed inside and covered again.
• The clay: Knight ties the surviving mould shape to unique Peebles fittings and calls a shared making role highly probable.
• The metal: A complete copper ingot, the first from Scotland, sat with the axeheads as unused raw material.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The firing floor: The burnt layer may mark mould-firing, or it may only be why the clay lasted.
• The return: No test yet shows whether anyone meant to recover the kit.
• The mine: Chemical work on the ingot has not yet named a source.

Those open points are the next paper, not a reason to treat the two sites as unrelated. The ground already holds a finished set and a maker’s dump close enough to walk between before dark.

Treasure Trove Kept the Context Intact

Stępień said he already knew the ground around Blyth Bridge mattered. He did not know the second find would lock onto the first. “When I first discovered the Blyth Hoard, I was excited to have found more Bronze Age material in an area that I already knew was archaeologically significant,” he said. “At that stage, I had no idea just how important the discovery might turn out to be.” He called it quite extraordinary that two discoveries he made so close together could be connected.

Knight thanked him for reporting as fast as he had with the Peebles Hoard, which let the museum dig the cairn while the clay and the burnt layer were still in place. Under Scots law, archaeological finds must be reported. The Treasure Trove Scotland Code of Practice sets how that report is logged, claimed for the Crown, and offered to museums. The Treasure Trove Unit, based at National Museums Scotland, assesses finds for the King’s and Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer. Claimed cases go to the independent Scottish Archaeological Finds Allocation Panel, which meets three times a year and advises on which accredited museum should hold them.

HOW A FIND REACHES A MUSEUM

• The report: The finder tells the Treasure Trove Unit and leaves the rest of the deposit in the ground if more may be there.
• The claim: The King’s and Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer can claim the find for the Crown as ownerless property.
• The panel: The allocation panel hears museum applications and recommends a home and, where due, an ex gratia award for the finder.
• The lab: Once allocated, conservators can clean, sample, and compare objects that would have lost their context if they had been bagged in the field.

Had the axehead been lifted and the clay smashed, the Peebles fittings would still look unmatched. The ingot would still be the first of its kind, but it would be a stray lump. Because Stępień stopped, Knight can set a mould fragment next to a Peebles fitting and argue they belong to the same hands. Research on both hoards is still running. The copper has not been sourced. Peebles conservation continues until 2028. The Borders now have the gear and the kit that may have made it, about 7 miles apart, waiting on a lab to say where the metal was born.