For 30 years, they believed the story that led them to the record-breaking discovery of hundreds of millions of coins

The huge, 750kg pile of coins from the 2012 discovery by detectorists Reg Mead and Richard Miles was recently recognised as a new world record for the number of coins in a single Iron Age assemblage. With a total of 69,347 Roman and Celtic coins, the depot surpassed the 42-year-old find of 54,951 coins in Wiltshire.

The silver coins date from between 50-30 BC. Back in 2012, their market value was estimated at £10 million, but this was later increased when gold and silver coins were also found at the centre of the huge assemblagesilver bracelets, glass beads or a gold-laced bag containing gold and silver jewellery, rings, coins and numerous precious metal fragments.

According to Mr Miles' account, the coins were not found by chance. In fact, in the 1980s, they received information from a woman who described strange "silver buttons" she had once seen in a field after a rain. It took 30 years before the friends actually found the source of the "buttons". Hidden on a farm in Grouville under a hedge a metre deep, they formed a large coin "blind".which was subsequently recovered with the surrounding soil in one block for examination under laboratory conditions.

"There was something that kept attracting us. We tried it every Sunday," Mr Miles recounted. "When I finally found the first coin, by the end of that day we had 20 in total." As the number of coins grew, they dug deeper and deeper. When they got to the depth of a whole spade, they hit something hard: "Did you hear that metal strike?"

The two men were there for the entire process, from discovery, announcement and retrieval, to preservation and media coverage, to entry into the Guinness Book of World Records. They also agree that participating and being involved in the whole process has been a truly wonderful experience for them.

"We are not surprised by this achievement and are delighted that such an impressive archaeological object has been discovered, researched and displayed in Jersey," said Olga Finch, Curator of Archaeology at Jersey Heritage Museum. "Once again this puts our island at the heart of international research into Iron Age coins and highlights the significant world heritage that Jersey has to offer."

There are so many coins in the find that it took almost five years to dismantle and catalogue the entire pile. The location of each individual coin and each of the objects in the assemblage were carefully recorded by scanner during the extraction process. This created a perfectly accurate 3D model for further research. The conservation of the coins has still not been completed.

The previous largest set of coins was discovered in 1978 in the former Roman town of Cunetio near Mildenhall. The depot contained 54,951 low-denomination copper coins minted in the 3rd century BC. The largest coin collection in the world was discovered in Brussels in 1908, when 150,000 medieval silver pennies from the 13th century were found.

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Roman Nemec

Sources: bbc.com, telegraph.co.uk