Along the Moors - Wappenshall

Ancient Celts

The Preston Hoard Was Discovered Near This Spot

The first edition Ordnance Survey map of the Weald Moors from 1881 reveals evidence of an unusual discovery at Kinley in the first half of the 19th Century. Twenty yards or so to the southeast of the culvert carrying the Crow Brook under the road to Preston, a cross symbol, annotated with the cryptic remark ‘Celts found’, marks the site where local farm worker William Pickering stumbled upon a hoard of five Bronze Age axes. Sadly, the ancient cache, which was unearthed during the course of drainage work in the area sometime between 1832 and 1833, was subsequently split up and the whereabouts of the prehistoric implements are now unknown.

However, the story does not end there. In 1954, the venerated Shropshire archaeologist Lily Chitty examined a middle Bronze Age artefact at nearby Eyton Hall that she felt sure must once have belonged to the hoard. The 7 inch axe, which Miss Chitty defined as a palstave (meaning it was designed to fit into a split wooden handle), weighed nearly one and a half pounds and contained fine detailing which she believed to belong to an early Irish tradition of craftsmanship. The hoard was the largest of several prehistoric finds around the fringes of the local peat deposits, indicating a long history of human activity on the Weald Moors; other finds include the discovery of several struck flints near Kynnersley and Adeney and a Bronze Age spearhead recovered on Dayhouse Moor around 1910.