What have the Romans ever done for us? In the case of one detectorist from North Wales, they have got him on the property ladder.
Darren Booth’s discovery of 377 denarii coins in a Shropshire field has landed him a payday, the haul — apparently a soldier’s savings — enabling him to obtain a mortgage.
“We can’t discuss values but I think we are talking low double-figure thousands,” Booth, 40, said. It is the historical worth that has given him the greater thrill. “It is remarkable to think that I was the first person to touch these coins in 2,000 years. You don’t get that kind of feeling with any other hobby,” he said.
The discovery has been declared as treasure and the coins are being bought by the British Museum and Shropshire Museums.
The coins include a rare example stamped with the visage of the Emperor Vespasian, only the second of its kind to be discovered in the UK.
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“The British Museum has the other but, luckily for me, my coin is in much better condition,” Booth said.
He will split the proceeds with the landowner of the field, near Gobowen in the Shropshire Marches, where the coins were found.
It had been ploughed shortly before their discovery, dredging the money up from centuries beneath the earth.
Initially Booth found one piece, the first Roman coin he had come across. One become two and then the trickle led to a collection of 273 coins buried in one stash. It is suspected that they belonged to a soldier who buried them for safekeeping but never returned. The money represented a year’s wages, and has coins stamped with other emperors, including Augustus, Vitellius, Galba and Tiberius.
“I was very excited to start with but then became very nervous because I was aware we were dealing with something so historic and so rare,” Booth, from Flintshire, said.
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“They were all scattered so we thought there was a chance the plough had struck a hoard and scattered these coins.”
It is thought that the coins had been placed in a container that rotted away.
Experts described the Gobowen hoard as important.
“Being composed of earlier issue coinage the purity level of the silver involved is somewhat higher than many later hoards,” Julian Evan-Hart, the editor of Treasure Hunting magazine, said.
“Issues of Galba and Vitellius are particularly prized as finds by detectorists due to their general scarcity and are therefore also highly collectible.”
