A complete copper ingot, a block of raw metal that Bronze Age smiths once melted down, has turned up in the Scottish Borders and National Museums Scotland calls it the first of its kind from Scotland. It lay in a small cairn alongside two socketed axeheads and the fragile remains of clay moulds, all of it uncovered after a metal detectorist stopped digging the moment he realized how much bronze was in the soil.
The man is Mariusz Stępień, and this is the second major Bronze Age hoard he has reported from the same stretch of Peeblesshire in two years. The new group of objects is known as the Blyth Hoard, and the museum dates it to the Late Bronze Age, around 1150 to 800 BC.
The Blyth Hoard and its cairn
According to the museum’s own account of the Blyth Hoard, written by Dr Matthew Knight, Senior Curator of Early Prehistory, Stępień found a 3,000-year-old socketed axehead near Blyth Bridge in 2022. He then noticed further bronze in the ground, left it where it lay and reported the site to the Treasure Trove Unit, which alerted National Museums Scotland.
Museum archaeologists opened a small trench and found the objects inside an ancient stone cairn. People had evidently moved stones aside to place them, then covered them again. The trench produced a second bronze socketed axehead, the copper ingot, degraded clay mould material and a layer of burnt material. The hoard has since been allocated to the museum and conserved at the National Museums Collection Centre in Edinburgh, according to Archaeology Magazine.
Knight credited the finder’s restraint. By reporting promptly, Stępień allowed a quick and safe excavation that kept the context of the objects intact.
A copper ingot with no precedent north of the border
Ingots are common in southern Britain, especially along the south coast, but the museum says none had been found north of the border until this one. Knight’s account reads the object as a sign that fresh raw metal was being brought into Scotland, not only that old bronze was being recycled. Chemical analysis of the copper is planned to identify where it came from, and the same testing could point to the metal sources behind both hoards.
The claim is specific to complete ingots. The museum’s wording is “the first of its kind from Scotland,” and it is the museum, not the finder or a press summary, that makes it.
Moulds that link the find to the Peebles Hoard
The remains of two, and possibly three, clay moulds or mould cores survive. Bronze Age moulds of this kind rarely last, and most Late Bronze Age examples were made for swords, axeheads and tools. These appear to be for fittings like those in the Peebles Hoard, which Stępień discovered in 2020. The museum suggests that whoever buried the Blyth Hoard may have helped make some or all of those fittings. As Radio Borders coverage quotes Knight, it is “really rare for mould materials to survive at all, so it’s a special find in its own right.”
The two sites are about 7 miles apart. The Peebles Hoard was found near Peebles on 21 June 2020, as its reference entry records, and held roughly 500 objects. The Museums Association reported its acquisition by National Museums Scotland in October 2024, along with a sword still in its wooden scabbard and two rattle pendants, the first of their kind found in Scotland.
The Peebles Hoard has itself kept producing results. Its bronze turned out to carry a silver-coloured sheen from a high level of surface tin, which National Museums Scotland reported in November 2025 and which experts believe metalworkers produced deliberately through an enrichment process, per the same reference entry. Pairing that finding with moulds for similar fittings in a second cairn gives researchers a workshop story to test, not only a pair of buried collections: raw copper arriving, fittings being cast and finished objects ending up in the ground within a few miles of each other.
Stępień told Radio Borders that, having already found the Peebles Hoard, he finds it “quite extraordinary” that two discoveries made so close together could be connected. He knew the area mattered archaeologically, but a link between two separate finds was not something he expected.
A buried cairn and the copper still to be traced
The museum does not offer a firm answer on why the Blyth Hoard was buried. It lists three possibilities: a special place, since the cairn already stood there; a marker for the hoard; or an intention to come back for the materials that was never fulfilled. The burnt layer in the trench may mean moulds were being fired on the spot.
What remains open is the origin of the copper. Knight’s page frames the ingot analysis as the next step, and its result will show whether the metal reached the Borders from sources that also supplied the Peebles Hoard.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
More from Morning Overview
