.It must have been the same year, or maybe 1958, an older brother, gave me what we assumed was a ‘foreign coin’, which he had found buried in sand, when digging a tunnel with pals, at the back of Eglinton School, Ardrossan.
It looked like an old Greek coin, and, without having done anything about it, I must have speculated a thousand times over the years whose head was on the front and who the standing figure was on the reverse – while all the time it just lay in the original box.
During the summer, I visited a ‘dig’ on the Cannon Hill, organised by the Ardrossan Castle Heritage Society, and was intrigued at how excited people got when they riddled away deposits of soil and found small fragments of this and that, and I wondered how elated they might be if they actually came across a coin.
I finally decided to find out about my coin and sent photographs of it to the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow. They referred me to Treasure Trove Scotland, to whom I also sent photographs, and to cut a long story short, they were able to tell me that it was a “STATER” of “MESSENIA” and that the head on the front was “DEMETER, 369-350 BC” (BC not AD), and that the standing figure on the reverse was ZEUS.
[STATER is an expression used to describe ancient coins used in various regions of Greece, and similar coins, imitating Greek staters, minted elsewhere in ancient Europe; MESSENIA is a regional unit in the south-western part of the Peloponnese region in Greece; DEMETER is the Greek goddess of the harvest, grain, and fertility, one of the Twelve Olympian gods that lived on Mount Olympus, and because she was the goddess of the harvest, she was very important to the farmers and peasant people of Greece; and ZEUS was the king of the Greek gods who lived on Mount Olympus, the god of the sky and thunder.]
There were certain aspects of my coin, however, which gave rise to a suspicion that it might be a replica, as described above, as opposed to a genuine coin.
The final test hinged on the weight of the coin – 12 grams genuine, anything less, likely to be a replica – and the result was 4.1 grams – or in other words a replica.
I don’t suppose we’ll ever know how a very good reproduction of a 369-350 BC coin came to be buried in sand at the back of Eglinton School but it was interesting finding out about it – AND SOMETHING ELSE SCORED OFF MY BUCKET LIST - I now know who is on the front and who is on the back!
"DEMETER AND ZEUS" below is a real coin as shown to me by Treasure Trove Scotland; "DEMETER" AND "ZEUS" separately comprise the Ardrossan find.
