The Inchtuthil Nail Hoard
9 comments
·May 5, 2025opwieurposiu
CamperBob2
This is just too awesome for words. Those kids will come away with memories that they couldn't have made any other way.
peepeepoopoo122
[flagged]
a_shovel
In another era this would have been a kingly fortune. That's one risk of buried treasure: not all treasure will keep its value well. You might find a pile of gold coins, or maybe it'll be aluminum spoons (once highly valuable), cowrie shells, or iron nails.
opwieurposiu
The labor for this many nails is intense. They had to first smelt the iron, cast the pigs, "puddle" the cast iron to remove carbon and make wrought iron, hammer the wrought into rod, and THEN they could start making the nails.
800,000 nails × 3 minutes = 2.4 million minutes = 40,000 hours = 20 Years of labor
Aloisius
3 minutes seems like an awful long time for an experienced smith to forge a nail.
ejp
Judging from a recent thing I watched[1] ... ~1.5 mins per nail (as of the 8.5 hr + 352 nail mark), while streaming and talking.
That would bring it down to only ~7 years of labor if we call it 1 min per nail, assuming that you're already working from prepared bar stock. Still a significant expenditure of skilled labor!
Nzen
tl;dr The article examines some context around a 5 ton hoard of ancient roman nails discovered during 1959, at Inchtuthil (near Dunkeld in Scotland). The romans built a fort and stockpiled these nails (and other materials) at Inchtuthil. However, they needed to abandon the fort and opted to bury a cache of nails six feet below ground, rather than cart them away or leave them in place. This prevented the locals from impounding the nails and melting them into other weapons against the romans. The quantity of nails indicates the scope of materials needed to construct a fort, as well as the blacksmithing quality available at the time.
If this interests you, I recommend Bret Devereaux's five part series about medieval iron production and use, https://acoup.blog/2020/10/02/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
I randomly found an anvil on sale for cheap and now our family has the blacksmithing bug. One of our favorite things to do is take a couple anvils and a small forge down to the park and let the kids smash red hot nails into "mini-swords". We have also started selling the swords on his lemonade cart, People actually buy them!
You would think this would be a dangerous activity but it turns out to be petty tame. About 1/20 kids burns a finger, and when they finish yelling they inevitably tough up and get back to work because they are having so much fun.
So anyway, scrounge up plumbing torch and some nails and let the kids make "mini-swords." You can use a sledge hammer or any big chunk of metal as your anvil.
If you want to see what the "swords" look like my kid has pictures on his site: https://lemonsword.com/