PUT it down to beginners' luck. David Booth has made the most important find of Iron Age gold in Scotland's history – seven yards from his car, on his first outing with a newly bought metal detector.
David Booth with the four gold Iron Age neck ornaments or torcs dating from the 1st and 3rd century BC
The game warden at a Stirlingshire safari park yesterday told of his "absolute disbelief" when he found four gold neck bands glinting in the soil under his hands.
More than 2,000 years old, they could bring him a reward of anywhere from a few hundred thousand pounds to a million. But, in archeological terms, the hoard of torcs, mixing local and far-flung Mediterranean craftmanship, is priceless.
Buried, perhaps, as a gift to the gods or to respect a dead chieftain, they were said yesterday to show both the considerable wealth and international connections in Scotland from the third to first century BC – the best of ancient European bling, something Queen Boudicca might have sported.
As treasure trove, they will take pride of place in one of Scotland's museums.
Chief game warden at the Blair Drummond Safari Park, where he normally cares for lions and elephants, Mr Booth, 35, is enjoying a better run of luck than a lottery winner.
Stepping from his car into a field, the location of which is now a closely guarded secret, he took out the detector he had brought for £240 from an internet site five days before.
He had tried it briefly at home, testing it on kitchen cutlery, digging up a few nails and coins in the garden. But when he tested it out on a flat piece of ground only a few steps behind his car, the machine immediately registered a gold find.
Using a spade, he began carefully to dig into the earth until he caught a glimpse of something he knew at once was gold. "It was absolute disbelief when I found it," he said. "I couldn't believe I had found something potentially precious. Half of me knew it was, and half of me knew it couldn't be."
He washed the mud off at home, where his girlfriend, fellow game warden Carolyn Morrison, 28, is expecting their first baby in February. "Her initial reaction was, we can't be that lucky."
In a first showing of the pieces under the watchful eye of experts at the National Museum of Scotland yesterday, Mr Booth held them in fine gloves after picking them out of the soil a month ago. Sharp-edged and shining, they looked as if they could have been made yesterday.
The museum called the four pieces the most important Iron Age hoard ever found in Scotland. All gold, they include two torcs, like delicately twisted ribbon, a local Northern European design likely to be from Ireland or Scotland.
But it is the two others that dramatically increase the find's rarity value. One is an ornate torc, broken in two, in a design characteristic of south-western France. The other, the most precious, is a hoop made of braided gold wire of ornate and flowing Mediterranean design.
They were being compared yesterday to a similar collection from 1806, known as the Cairnmuir hoard, found by a shepherd in Netherurd in Peeblesshire. That find also originally consisted of the parts of four torcs and 40 gold coins or pieces of bullion. The material ranged from local torc types to imported material from southern Britain and France. Most of that haul was melted down.
Mr Booth has worked at Blair Drummond, with its elephants and lions, from the age of 19. He said yesterday he had bought the detector for a "bit of fun" and picked the field because a local landowner gave him permission to search there. "I had probably about an hour's use," he said. "I had been practising around the garden and in the house; coins and bits and pieces.
"It was a complete coincidence. The field I was going to go into, I parked up alongside it because I couldn't go into it. I got the metal detector out, set it up, and there was an area of flat ground behind where I had parked, so I thought I would scan it first. Literally, about seven steps from where I parked, there it was."
The machine gives different readings for metals such as iron and silver, but it showed gold. Only later, he said, he heard that even spent shotgun shells can give a gold reading. He reached for a spade.
"When I got the signal, I dug quite big round it. I saw a glimpse of one of them; I had a small trowel as well, so I took my time uncovering them," he said. "I had a very good idea it was gold, so I was very careful.
"Once I came across it and I had the pieces all sitting there, I knew it looked important, but thought I couldn't be that lucky on my first go.
"I took it home, made a wee clean-up and went online, looked at some torcs and kind of guessed it was Iron Age history."
He filled out a treasure trove report online and submitted photographs. Then he stored the torcs in his shotgun case. About four hours after experts at the National Museum's Treasure Trove Unit saw the photographs, they met Mr Booth at his office to collect the items. Colleagues, he said, were simply stunned.
Under Scottish law, the treasure is Crown property. "It is normal practice in Scotland that the finder receives an award which is deemed to be full market value of the objects," said Dr David Caldwell, of the treasure trove unit. He said reports of the find being worth £1 million were exaggerated, but a similar torc found in Newark, Nottinghamshire, in 2005, was bought for £350,000 last year. The Scottish Archaeological Finds Allocation Panel (SAFAP) will decide their value.
The gold was found by Mr Booth on 28 September together in a "wee pile".
As archeologists rapidly excavated the area this month, they found it lay in a pit within the circular footprint of a large timber round-house. They found no other artefacts or remains, in a "surprisingly barren" site, but Mr Booth's "exemplary" behaviour allowed them to secure it for excavations before copycat treasure-hunters could converge. Dr Fraser Hunter, Iron Age and Roman curator, called it a "stunning find" of international importance.
With tests ahead of where the gold originates, the pieces of foreign design may have been commissioned for someone in Scotland, or brought back by a traveller, diplomatic emissary, or mercenary, or after a marriage alliance.
The braided torc, a hybrid between Irish or Scottish styles and Mediterranean workmanship, was like "no other torc from Iron Age Europe", Dr Hunter said. The find illustrated the range and quality of Scotland's contemporary connections, far from being "a backwater on the edge of Europe".
"This is top-notch European bling," he said. "This is the kind of stuff the highest of the high were using. It shows these people are very well connected and also are able to get individual commissions. All these things are custom-made, none of these things is off the shelf. The one torc is a completely unique, spectacular piece."
The hoard could have been buried for safekeeping, but the pieces of one torc hint it could have been buried as an offering, like a sword or seal ritually destroyed after a chief's death.
"We are in 350BC, we are in deep pre-history, so we can't actually say anything about threats at that time," Dr Hunter went on. "Recent work has suggested very few of these things are buried for safety, most of them were buried as some form of gift for the gods, a votive offering. I expect these were likely to be similar."
Mr Booth – facing the cameras for the first time, amid a blaze of publicity – said yesterday, modestly, that any reward would be "very, very handy." Some of his friends, he reckoned, would be getting metal detectors this Christmas. "As for himself? "I'll keep searching," he said. "Whether I find anything like that again is another question."
