In 2004 a metal detector enthusiast in the Cumbrian countryside came across what he thought was a Victorian brooch.

He showed it to an expert, who told him it dated from around 1,000 years before the Victorians, and said there would have been two of them. He sent him back to find the other.

Sure enough, another brooch turned up. That find led to a large-scale exploration of the site – and to the new display which opened in Tullie House yesterday.

Called “Vikings Revealed”, the museum and art gallery in Carlisle is putting on show an array of Viking objects that were unearthed in land beside Cumwhitton.

It turned out that the site where the brooches were found was a Viking burial ground, dating from the early part of the 10th century

Six graves were discovered, which may not sound like a lot, but many more were probably destroyed by ploughing and farming over the course of the last millennium.

And Tullie House curator of archaeology Tim Padley says proudly: “This is the largest collection of pagan Viking items in the same place in any gallery in England.”

The bones, flesh and clothes of the dead have long since disintegrated in the acidic Cumbrian soil – but the various objects they took with them to the grave have outlived the bodily remains. And they tell us a certain amount about their owners.

For a start, Tim explains, they date from the pagan era. The Vikings were converted to Christianity in the second half of the 10th century. But the habit of burying people with important possessions was a pagan custom – placing the funerals in the first half of that century.

The owner of the pair of brooches was a Viking woman. They would have used to pin her dress at either shoulder.

Science showed that insects got into the brooches before the body was buried – suggesting she was of some importance. “She must have been lying in state for a while,” Tim says.

And the remains of an iron box in her grave contained combs, shears, needles and a device for smoothing linen. “Pagan people believed you would need all these in the afterlife.”

Her grave also bears similarities to those found in Norway. Some of Cumbria’s Vikings had settled in Ireland before crossing the sea, but these ones seem to have come directly from Scandinavia. “They have a direct connection with Norway.”

The other five graves have been named “The Swordsman”, “The Warrior”, “The Host”, “The Younger Woman” and “The Damaged Grave”.

The last of these contains only a spear head but the other, less damaged ones contain much more. The Warrior’s grave contains a range of weaponry – sword, axe, spear, shield and knife.

The Swordsman was wearing spurs, which show he was wealthy enough to own a horse. The Host is so called because he was found with a drinking horn, with a capacity of around a pint – showing that even in Viking days beer was drunk by the pint.

And the Younger Woman’s grave contains jewellery of a very different design to that found with the other, older woman’s grave. Fashions of jewellery changed with the generations, just as clothing fashions do.

All the objects were high quality, upmarket items at the time.

As Tim puts it: “It’s John Lewis stuff, not Primark stuff. None of the people were everyday people – they were the posh people. Burial was partly about status, about showing the position they had in society.”

At the opening of the exhibition there was a real live Viking, there in full 10th century costume – one Einar Blueaxe.

His other name is Adam Parsons, and he is archaeologist who specialises in Viking remains. Adam is originally from Storth in south Cumbria and has studied the items unearthed in many different sites, but this is the first to take him back to his home county.

“To me this is definitely the most personally interesting and professionally exciting one,” he says..

Careful study of the graves shows some of the strange burial customs of pagan Vikings.

For example, in the Warrior’s grave the axe head had been forcefully embedded in a lump of wood, and the spear then balanced carefully on top of it.

“That’s not just putting items in the grave. It seems to have been part of some sort of ritual,” Adam reckons.

One funeral custom, noted elsewhere and possibly present here, was rather grisly. “Some Viking graves had horses’ heads or butchered seagulls or various dismembered animals in them.

“We have spaces at the foot of these graves that may have contained animals, although there are no remains. The soil is acidic and eats away anything organic very fast.”

Archaeology gives a different dimension to what we understand about the Vikings. “It’s a snapshot, or like joining the dots,” Tim says. .

And it may create a more rounded, less biased picture than the written records.

The written accounts portray the Vikings as violent raiders and pillagers, but as Adam says this is mostly because they were written by their victims.

They may well have been violent – and certainly there are lot of weapons in the graves. But coming into contact with everyday items such as drinking horns, combs. needles or a young woman’s jewellery helps us view them differently. “We tend to have a binary approach,” Adam notes. “We think that either the Vikings were violent or they were skilled craftsmen.

“But it’s case of ‘and’, not ‘or’. You could have been a warrior, and kind and gentle towards
your family, and a good craftsman.”

And they may have interacted reasonably well with the Anglo-Saxons. There’s evidence that some of the Anglo-Saxons adopted Viking dress or fashions.

The Anglo-Saxon language and the Norse language belong to the same family of Germanic languages.

Modern English and Norwegian are very distinct today, but 1,000 years ago they would have been closer – so the two peoples would have been able to understand each other, more or less. “It might have been like a Geordie speaking to a Cornish person nowadays,” Adam speculates.

It has taken 12 years since the graves were first discovered to create the exhibition at Tullie House. A £70,000 grant from the Wolfson Foundation has helped pay for it.

Adam explains: “If you want to see pagan Viking graves there are three places to go: the National Museum of Ireland, the National Museum of Scotland and Tullie House.

“That’s quite a claim to fame. It will probably put the British Museum’s nose out of joint!”