One of Britain's if not Europe's most important historic artefacts, the Mold Gold Cape, was found in a field close to the small town of Mold in Flintshire, North Wales. Although the original find is today housed in pride of place in the British Museum, London, a copy is on display in Mold library. Our picture is of the original Mold Cape. In 1833 workmen quarrying for stone in an ancient burial mound in a field named Bryn yr Ellyllon (Hill of the Fairies or Goblins) found this unique ceremonial gold cape, which remains unparalleled to this day. At the centre of the mound was a stone-lined grave with the crushed gold cape around the fragmentary remains of a skeleton. Strips of bronze and numbers of amber beads were recovered, but only one of the beads reached the British Museum. The cape is one of the finest examples of prehistoric sheet-gold working and is dated to the Bronze Age, about 1900-1600 BC. It was laboriously beaten out of a single ingot of gold, then embellished with intense decoration of ribs and bosses to mimic multiple strings of beads amid folds of cloth. The fragile cape broke up during recovery and the pieces were dispersed among various people. Although the British Museum acquired the greater proportion in 1836, small fragments have come to light over the years and have been reunited. Many of the objects found in the grave have long disappeared such as the skeletal remains, most of the amber beads and several pieces of the cape, but fortunately the vicar of Mold recorded the finds which has enabled the reconstruction of the cape. I have long held the belief that when the Welsh or their ancestors the Celts referred to "fairies" they were referring to the aborigines, the pre Celt original inhabitants of the British Isles and this Bronze Age find in the "Hill of the Fairies" would appear to back this up. ....

Review Mold Gold Cape in Wales.