Ringlemere Cup

Ringlemere Cup

Photographed on 29 August 2007
Material	Gold
Created	1700-1500 BC
Discovered	Ringlemere barrow in 2001
Present location	British Museum

The Ringlemere Gold Cup is a Bronze Age vessel found in the Ringlemere barrow near Sandwich in the English county of Kent in 2001.

The body of the cup was created by hammering a single piece of gold, with the handle cut from a flat strip of gold and attached by rivets. Although badly crushed by recent plough damage it can be seen to have been 14 cm high with corrugated sides. The cup resembles a late Neolithic (approximately 2300 BC) ceramic beaker with Corded Ware decoration, but dates to a much later period.

It is thought that the cup was not a grave good, but a votive offering independent of any inhumation, which was placed at the centre of the barrow in about 1700–1500 BC. No contemporary burials have been found at the site, although later Iron Age ones have since been found, along with a Saxon cemetery.

Only seven similar gold "unstable handled cups" (unstable because round-bottomed) have been found in Europe, all dating to the period between 1700 and 1500 BC. The Ringlemere cup is most similar to the other British example, the Rillaton gold cup found in Cornwall in 1837. The other examples are two from Germany, two from Switzerland, one now lost from Brittany, and an unprovenanced, perhaps German, example. Two other silver cups and, from Britain, two amber and some shale cups all share the same basic shapes (see Hove amber cup). The finds in Britain are in the approximate Wessex area, and on the continent near the Rhine or the Channel coast, suggesting that the vessels, though probably all made fairly locally to their find spots, related to a specific cross-channel trading zone.

The cup was discovered by metal detectorist Cliff Bradshaw on 4 November 2001. He reported the find to the local coroner's office, and through the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Treasure Act 1996 the cup was recorded and declared to be treasure in 2002. It was bought by the British Museum for £270,000 (roughly US$520,000), with the money paid split between Bradshaw and the Smith family who own Ringlemere Farm. The money to secure the cup for the nation was raised through donations by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the National Art Collections Fund and The British Museum Friends.