The British Book of Lost Treasures: 50 Mysteries of Buried Gold, Sunken Ships and Vanished Crown Jewels

A king's baggage train swallowed by the tide. A pirate who seized the richest ship in the Indian Ocean and vanished. A cape of gold dug from a mound where a woman had once seen a ghost dressed in gold.

For so small a country, Britain has lost an extraordinary amount of treasure, and kept unusually good records of what went missing. A crown sank into the Fens. An Armada ship blew up in a Hebridean harbour. Monks hid their plate from Henry VIII, Jacobites buried French gold beside a Highland loch, and robbers stopped a mail train and took millions, most of which were never traced.

The British Book of Lost Treasures brings together fifty of the most remarkable stories, from a king's crown lost in the Wash in 1216 to a Viking hoard found in a Galloway field in 2014, and asks the question most treasure books never ask: what does the evidence actually show?

50 true stories. Every one traced back to the records.

Each chapter returns to the earliest surviving sources (chronicles, state papers, inquest records, salvage logs, court transcripts and museum archives) and ends with a clear verdict. Some treasures are safe in museum cases. Some still lie under fields and seabeds. Some were never there at all. Where the sources disagree, the book says so. Where a story is legend, it is called legend.

Inside you will discover:

• The last 22 gold bars of the Laurentic, still somewhere on the seabed off Donegal
• Colonel Blood, who disguised himself as a parson and tried to carry the Crown Jewels out of the Tower of London
• The Irish Crown Jewels, which vanished from a safe in Dublin Castle that nobody had forced
• The Hoxne Hoard, found by a man searching a Suffolk field for a lost hammer
• Sutton Hoo, the Staffordshire Hoard and the Galloway Hoard: who buried them, and why?
• Dunwich, the drowned medieval town whose streets have been mapped with sonar
• King Arthur's grave, the Holy Grail and the Templar gold of Rosslyn: what lies behind the legends

Why this book is different

• Evidence first: fact, tradition and disputed testimony are kept clearly apart
• A verdict for every case: found, lost, recovered, or never there at all
• Where to see it today: museums, castles, wreck sites and walks across England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland
• For metal detectorists: a plain guide to the Treasure Act, Scottish treasure trove and the rules on wrecks
• Easy to dip into: each chapter is a complete story, ideal for one sitting
• Fully sourced: notes for every chapter and a select bibliography

A perfect gift for history lovers, detectorists, divers and anyone who has ever wondered what lies beneath their feet.

The third book in The British Book of... series. Open it anywhere. Start digging.