Once again Basil used the same methods that had served him well with the other mounds. Some of the wonderfull jewelry in the hoard. Even so Basil Brown found some silver shield adornments and bits of silver gilt for horn cup decorations, as well as a blue glass jar and a couple of iron blades. The grave robbers had made a complete mess of the tomb and the incumbent had disappeared. Here he carried out more or less the same methods and again digging down near the center he found a Saxon grave that had been ransacked with all the objects removed. That was all they found in the rest of the mound, but Basil was interested enough to have a go at Mound 2.
Basil started by digging an exploratory trench from west to east and when he got to the center of the mound he dug down 2 meters and came across the remains of a human skeleton and the bones of a horse together with axes and a jug.
The mound was 25 meters wide and nearly 1.5 meters high. Even with the three of them the task was enormous. Pretty volunteered the services of her gardener, John Jacobs, and her gamekeeper William Spencer. Because there was so much earth to be moved Mrs. After much discussion it was decided to dig in Mound 3, even though Mrs. Pretty asked Guy Maynard the Curator of Ipswich Museum for advice and he referred her to Basil Brown an archeologist familiar with the area. One mound, but not the one with the boat, has been restored to its proper height and so gives a good indication of what the whole site must have looked like. Many of these mounds can still be seen today although much reduced by the passage of time and agricultural activity. As far back as the 6th century and probably before, noble and eminent people had been buried in barrows or large earthen mounds, often with their possessions and sometimes with their favorite horse. So what is Sutton Hoo, and how did it come to give up its secrets? At the least, Sutton Hoo is a large burial ground. For them to survive at all, down through the passage of so many years is astonishing enough, but more to the point is the light that these objects shine on a period of our English history that is not truly understood and often drifts between fact and myth. To see the helmet, which incidentally, was in pieces when they found it, and to hold the great sword dating from the 7th century was a strange and exciting experience. Upstairs they had the whole treasure including the Iconic helmet that the great Anglo Saxon king wore in battle.