The summer of 1939 saw one of the most exciting archaeological finds ever dug from British soil, an undisturbed Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo, near Woodbridge in Suffolk. The ship, nearly 30m long, had been dragged uphill from the estuary of the River Deben to a royal gravefield and buried beneath a large circular mound. Amidships, in a textile-hung chamber, a sumptous burial was laid out unique in its glittering wealth of jewellery and unrivalled in the variety of objects that had been selected to represent every facet of the dead man's life.