Cork 2005: A golden hoard of prehistoric metals has been brought together for the first time at the Cork City Museum, where Mary Cahill of the National Museum introduced the "Cork Gold" exhibition as an outstanding contribution to the Capital of Culture programme.
Here Cork's 19th-century finds, or "hoards" of gold have united the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, the British Museum in London, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney, in a presentation of some of the finest and most interesting aspects of the work of goldsmiths in the Bronze Age (2400BC-600BC) and Iron Age (600BC-400AD).
As Mary Cahill pointed out, their survival also illuminates an aspect of Cork's 19th- and 20th-century intellectual life. Although the finds themselves were made by people working on the land whose first response was usually to convert the treasure to cash, the antiquarian collectors who paid for them also often sold them on.
The information panels written by Alicia St Leger show how 19th-century collectors in Cork, as elsewhere, had the education, time and resources to pursue their interests. Thomas Crofton Croker's collection contained more than 700 lots when sold by auction after his death in 1854, and in 1913 it took four days for Sotheby's to auction the antiquities belonging to the Corkman Robert Day, while more were auctioned over another five days in 1915.
In this exhibition, all the items came originally from Cork. They are beautiful and strange, but modest enough: cloak-fasteners, rings and bracelets, torcs and lunulae, some decorated in designs of minute and exquisite detail, all remnants of family riches laid away perhaps in times of upheaval or in a primitive banking system preparing for a rainy day which never arrived. Complimenting the museum and its curator Stella Cherry and her staff on achieving the very exacting standards demanded by the lending institutions Mary Cahill, herself a scholar of prehistoric gold, was too polite to add that the exhibition deserves publicity material which could be taken away by visitors and that the museum should be open to such visitors on a Saturday.
