Wiltshire Heritage Museum Stages £750,000 Bronze Age Exhibition

Quite rightly hoping to cash in on the current high level of interest in Stonehenge because of the imminent opening of the startling new visitor centre, the Wiltshire Heritage Museum in Devizes is staging a quite magnificent exhibition of gold objects that date to a similar time scale as the famous megalith.

It is the first time that these objects have gone on display in the county, and include a ceremonial axe, dagger and jewellery which are among 500 Early Bronze Age objects on show.  It is hoped that the £750,000 exhibition will attract "substantial numbers" of visitors from nearby Stonehenge.

Cashing in on "Stonehenge Mania"

David Dawson, from the museum, said: "Many of the items may well have been worn by priests and chieftains as they worshipped inside Stonehenge itself. We've got lots of gold objects that are on display for the first time ever because we've never had the security and environmental conditions we need to display them properly," he added  "And most of the pieces were discovered within a half mile radius of Stonehenge."

The  axe and dagger are, according to Mr Dawson, "identical to images of weapons carved into the stones of Stonehenge. The objects tell the story of the people who lived in and around the Stonehenge landscape when the monument was one of the great religious focal points of western Europe," he said.

"We believe it's a major step forward in helping to explain the extraordinary sophistication of the remarkable people who used the prehistoric monument."

The exhibition has been funded by a combination of the Heritage Lottery Fund, English Heritage and Wiltshire Council. On display is a collection of 30 pieces of Early Bronze Age gold - the largest ever to be put on public display in England, according to the museum.

Unearthed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the rarely seen collection includes "high status objects" from the burials of people who used the ancient site.

                                                     Wiltshire Heritage Museum