The mysterious case of the West Tilbury torc from Essex.

A few months ago, I received an email from Andrew Fitzpatrick, a fellow Iron Age specialist, regarding something he had seen in Christopher Tripp's book, Thurrock’s Deeper Past: a confluence of time (Tripp 2018, 108). The book mentioned a torc, found in West Tilbury, Essex, in 2000, which had apparently disappeared from the public gaze. Tripp's account was based on an earlier, more detailed, article by the late Randal Bingley, then curator of Thurrock Museum, which was written for the 2015 issue of the Thurrock Local History Society's publication Panorama (Bingley 2015, 70).

Tripp's and Bingley's accounts of a ploughed up torc, now sold or hidden - and the various rumours surrounding it - had piqued Andrew's interest. As neither of us had heard of the torc before, I offered to carry out some more research so that - if nothing else - there was a record of it in the public domain, on The Big Book of Torcs. This article is the result of that research.