Buried hoards of Roman coins are constantly being turned up – usually by metal detectorists – throughout Britain. Relatively few, however, have been discovered in Derbyshire. The county was a sparsely-inhabited, semi-military zone in the Roman period; there was only one reasonably significant town at Aquae Arnemetiae (Buxton) and a few forts with attached civilian settlements called vici. Here, Adrian Marsden looks at one of the largest hoards of Roman coins so far recovered from Derbyshire.
THE GRASSMOOR HOARD was found by a metal detectorist near Chesterfield in early 2001. Grassmoor lies close to the route of a Roman Road, the modern-day A61, running south from Rotherham to Derby. However, there is no evidence of any Roman settlement in the immediate area and we might surmise that the hoard was either buried by a traveller along the road or by someone living close to the nearby Chesterfield fort, which seems to have been abandoned by this date…