Herb Robert takes you back in time some thirteen hundred years to Mercia, one of the most powerful Anglo Saxon kingdoms of its age. Today, it can be seen through the eyes of the largest ever Anglo-Saxon Gold Hoards discovered in a Staffordshire field on the 5th July 2009.  On that day, parts of history were re-written. In keeping with the many Anglo-Saxon riddles found within the £3.3 million Hoard itself, Alicia’s design can be linked to Tony Herbert, the metal detector enthusiast who discovered these lost treasures from the Dark Ages, largely because of the flower, Herb Robert.  It is the very same flower that grows through the gold and garnets within the Herb Robert image where it sprouts reddish-purple flowers among palmate-shaped leaves.

With special access, Moorcroft designer, Alicia Amison, studied many of the 3500 pieces of the Hoard at The Potteries Museum in Stoke -on-Trent. The vast variety of patterns showed outstanding artistry and craftsmanship. Fundamentally shaken, Alicia focused her attention on some exquisite gold filigree work - the art of soldering wires to the surface of objects for decorative effect, not unlike the designer’s own raised tubelining used in Moorcroft art.

Cleverly, Alicia has designed the lid of her box with an illusory snakeshead interlace less than a millimetre thick and found on sword pommels. With the pale blue lid of the box depicting the sky, and with Herb Robert appearing to grow out of the entwined snakesheads themselves, the illusion is given a further twist. It is almost as if you are the gold buried in the ground, looking upwards from an earth-bound grave right through the snakeshead to a clear blue sky above. The dark-blue ground represents the earth below where a wholly different treasure was found buried at Sutton Hoo decades earlier, all of it adorned with deep imagery found on the swords and helmets of Beowulf’s ‘Golden Warriors’.  Each image in Herb Robert is held together like a jigsaw puzzle to help us understand yet another gift from antiquity.

Available for delivery in the following locations:

United Kingdom (England, Wales, Mainland Scotland, Scottish Islands, Scottish Highlands, Isle of Wight, Isles of Scilly)

Where above it states available to ‘pre-order online’ we are able to order this item from Moorcroft Pottery however, each piece is individually hand made by them and the delivery times will vary greatly depending on it position in production. Please call us if you wish to discuss your interest in this item and to allow us to advice on its estimated delivery time.
There are no mail order forms available for this item.