The luck of discovery

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It seemed like a routine job when the team of diggers arrived at an unprepossessing scrap of land, sandwiched between a busy road and a railway line, in October 2003. The land, at Prittlewell, a suburb of Southend, in Essex, was wanted for a road-widening scheme and a team of archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology Service had been called in to carry out an evaluation of the site. What they found was one of the most important archaeological discoveries ever made in Britain: the burial chamber of an Anglo-Saxon king.

The site, to the east of Prittle Brook, which flows into the Roach estuary about 2.5 kilometres to the north, was in an area that had been inhabited since prehistoric times. Previous discoveries were made here during the construction of the London to Southend railway in the late 19th century and of local housing in the 1920s. These included Roman burials and both male and female Anglo-Saxon graves, which contained a large number of weapons in the male 'warrior' graves, of which there were about 16, and a smaller number of brooches in the female ones.

The primary objective of the archaeological evaluation was to assess the extent of the Anglo-Saxon cemetery, which was not known. The fact that an evaluation trench was placed on the site of the burial chamber turned out to be pure good fortune. As the team leader, Ian Blair, told Time Team, the location of the trench was determined by the fact that the spoil from the evaluation dig couldn't be taken off site. 'If we'd put it where I originally planned to put it we would have missed the chamber grave completely.' It was, he agreed with Tony Robinson, 'complete luck'.

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