Sutton Hoo

The account

Under a quiet Suffolk mound a whole ship had been dragged uphill and buried with a king, Raedwald of East Anglia, most think. When it opened in 1939 out came gold-and-garnet shoulder clasps, a sword, silver from Byzantium, and the iron helmet that became the face of a lost age. The wood had rotted to a ghost in the sand; the treasure had not.

Leads, where the trail points now

• The great Anglo-Saxon ship burial was excavated in 1939 at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, on the eve of war; the helmet, gold buckle, and regalia are in the British Museum.
• The site is National Trust land and fully protected; the open work is the surrounding mounds and the wider royal landscape, still being surveyed.
• The famous helmet was rebuilt from fragments, and new geophysical survey keeps finding features around the cemetery.