Monday was spent with a friend at Sutton Hoo, an Anglo-Saxon burial site near Woodbridge in Suffolk. This was discovered in the 1930s to be a very important Anglo-Saxon burial ground when the then owner, Mrs Edith Pretty asked an archaeologist to excavate the "mounds" on her property. It has now been decided by the "experts" that the main burial mound is that of King Raedwald, a very important Anglo-Saxon king who died around 625AD.   The majority of the artefacts found at the site are in the British Museum, Mrs Pretty donated them to the museum. So Sutton Hoo itself has mostly replicas on display. At first this seems a pity, one feels the real ones should be at Sutton Hoo, which since the 1990s has been owned by the National Trust, but on reflection you realise that they are safe for all posterity at the British Museum. (After all we know the British Museum doesn't part with anything once it gets its hands on it!)

There is not really much to see now, especially of King Raedwald's tomb, but apparently it was extremely important as he was buried in a ship, which was estimated to be about 80 m long . The positions of the prow and stern have been identified, but this and all the other burial mounds were plundered at some time in the past, including Tudor times. They missed all the gold artefacts in King Raedwald's tomb and these are now in the British Museum.

There were apparently two ship burials, in itself unusual.
 
My friend and I took a guided tour of the site which allowed us to actually walk on the mounds, which you cannot do if you just walk around. We had a very informative guide who was also an archaeologist and had worked on the site when further excavations were done in the 1990s. I learned something I didn't realise, that Suffolk is mostly very acidic sand, so that anything, ships timbers or bodies and bones, all rapidly disappear, so that when a burial mound is excavated there is nothing there except a formation in the sand called a "sand body". This however, is enough to determine the gender and approximate age of the person (or horse) buried there. Horses apparently have much denser bones than humans so their bones take longer to disappear than human ones.   We saw the site of a double burial, quite unusual, of a young warrior and his horse.

I have included a few photos, but they don't really tell you much as there s really only grassy mounds or burial sites marked with stones, to see now.