| Description | Large quantities of coin moulds and silver coins; crucibles and funnels found in the neighbourhood of Lingwell Gate from 1607 to 1879.
1607: coins found? No details (O.S. SMR.)
1697: coin moulds found (Thoresby, 1697; Camden, 1722. )
1814 15: coins and moulds found (O.S. SMR.) 1821 22: silver coins, coin moulds (some of which still contained coins,) at least four crucibles and at least one funnel. The moulds alone were described as being more than could be contained in a bushel measure (Batty, J.
1877; Roberts, 1822; British Museum.)
1830/1840: coins and moulds (Wardell, J., 1869. Historical Notices of Ilkley, p.57; O. S. SMR Card.)
1879: coins and moulds? No details (O.S. SMR.) The coins ranged in date from Hadrian (A.D. 117 138) to Alexander Severus (A.D. 222 235); the moulds continued to Postumus (A.D. 259 268.) Generally believed in the 19th century to be evidence of forging activity rather than legitimate coining.
Exact find spot s are unknown; on O.S. 1st edn. 6inch to the mile map sheet 233, surveyed circa 1848 51, only the general area around what is now Lingwell Gate Farm is indicated as the 1820's find spot.
There are quantities of these coin moulds and coins in the British Museum, Wakefield Museum, Leeds City Museum and the Tolson Museum; they are probably also extensively distributed among private collections.
See PRN 4487 for a square crop mark enclosure with entrance lane to northeast, at SE 320 258 on Lingwell Gate Farm, which may be related.
‘On Friday last, a gentleman visited Langwell Gate, near Wakefield. a particular part of a field of former discoveries, then in an arable state and found eight or ten perfect clay moulds for Roman coins, and about thirty broken pieces of the same description of mould; also a piece of a crucible, which probably had been broken by the plough share. On the 13th March, 1821, a wheelbarrowfull of these moulds was found in the same field, together with four crucibles all perfect. Three of them had lids or covers. The same year one crucible with some moulds was sent to the Antiquarian Society, Somerset House, and another to the British Museum. Gough’s Camden Brit. vol.3, page 279, states that between Wakefield Outwood, and Thorp on the Hill, at Lingwell Gate were found in 1697 certain clay moulds for Roman coins, all of such Emperors in whose reigns the money is known to have been counterfeited. This place may take its name from the Langones quartered at Ollcana, Ilkley and Wall, a corruption of Vallura, and they may have encamped on Thorp the Hill.’
From the Doncaster Gazette 14/04/26
See also Philosophical Transactions, 282 (1702), no. 6, p.1289; Philosophical Transactions 234. |