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Broighter Hoard



A hoard of gold artefacts from the Iron Age of the 1st century BC that were found in 1896 by Tom Nicholl and James Morrow on farmland near Limavady, Northern Ireland.[2] The hoard includes a 7-inch-long (18 cm) gold boat, a gold torc and bowl and some other jewellery.



 Broighter Collar (c.100-50 BCE)

The luxuriously ornamented Broighter gold collar (torc), along with the Petrie Crown, is one of Ireland’s greatest surviving masterpieces of Celtic metalwork art from the Irish Iron Age.  Made by Irish metalworkers and goldsmiths during the first century BCE, the Broighter collar is a delicate tube of gold decorated in the La Tene style of Celtic art: a form influenced by Greek and Etruscan culture. Each end of the collar is buffer-shaped and fit together using a beautifully made T-shaped locking device.


The miniature boat is made out of sheet gold, a sheet gold bowl, two torcs made of twisted gold bars, two loop-in-loop gold chains with terminal boxes of sheet gold, and a large hollow torc made of hammered sheet gold highly decorated with incised and high relief swirls and arcs. The boat is obsessively detailed, complete with oars, benches, a rudder, yardarm and various tools.