Casgliadau Arlein

Bronze Age decorated gold lock-ring

This is a fragment of a gold-lock ring, represented by a surviving face-plate and fragment of an inner tube-plate, now crumpled and distorted. When complete, the lock-ring would have appeared as a hollow penannular ring, with a three-dimensional and biconical shape and with a triangular shaped cross-section.

The upper surface of the surviving face-plate is decorated with 79 narrow furrows, approximately 0.18mm apart from each other, incised in a concentric pattern which follows the circular edges of the face-plate. The furrows are defined and executed in a very fine manner with no errors evident. Narrow plain bands can be seen across the inner and outer edges of this surface which are, respectively, approximately 0.5mm and 0.2mm in width. The inner surface of the face-plate is plain and largely unblemished. The external rim of the interior face plate is angled or bevelled, with a varying width of 0.5-1.5mm. Its surface is rough, in contrast with the smoothness of the rest of the surface, suggesting the edges of the two plates may originally have been bonded or welded together.

The central tube-shaped sheet survives across approximately one-quarter to one-third of its original length, its outer surface difficult to make out amongst the crushed gold. The upper edge of the surviving tube-plate has been folded over and is attached to the inner edge of the face-plate, securing the two components together. Although incomplete and distorted, the manner in which this section of the lock-ring has crumpled suggests that it may once have had triangular end faces at the terminals, and that these were once integral extensions of the tube-plate.

The surfaces of the face-plate and tube-plate have surface scratches and localised tears. The crumpling of the artefact has meant there is a small quantity of soil caught within the folds of the sheet gold, although this is unlikely to significantly affect the current weight of the artefact.

The upper surface of the face-plate is yellow-gold in appearance. The lower surface of the face-plate and the tube-plate appear slightly more reddish in colour, particularly within the recesses/creases.