Treasure Hunt at Creake Abbey (Sunday Times, July 26, 1953)
By Ian Fleming
The needle on the micro-ammeter was steady on zero. There were some rain-clouds in the sky, and through the fringes of them the July sun blazed down with extra heat. From somewhere came the drowsy swish of a scythe. Under the eaves of the neighbouring house the martins twittered softly round a broken nest. Twenty feet away, at the end of the black snake of cable, Corporal Hogg, R.E. slowly swung his locator in a wide arc over the disused herb-garden beneath which, four feet down, lay the tiled floor, untrodden for 400 years, of the Chapter House of the ancient Abbey of Creake.
Suddenly there was a flicker on the control-instrument which I was operating. Then a sharp dip, which went on through forty to sixty, then to hundred, the end of the scale. The Corporal would be seeing the same figures on the dial in front of him, on the frame of his locator. I turned the sensitivity-switch down to nine, then to eight, then to seven. Still the needle clung to the end of the scale.
“Six. Corporal.” I called. “Sixty on six.” The Corporal inched the long nose of his locator through a clump of rosemary. The needle swung back towards zero. He moved the locator back and at once the needle returned to sixty. He stopped. “ Here,” he said.
“There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure,” wrote Mark Twain in the “Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” In me that particular boy has never died.
Ever since, on May 3 last, The Sunday Times offered to investigate likely tales of buried treasure, I had been examining the letters that came in to the Editor. I had had helpful talks with the Royal School of Mines on methods of detecting different metals under the ground; Messrs. Siebe Gorman had advised on problems of underwater search and hazards of foul air (in wells, for instance); and the Special Branch of Scotland Yard had told me where people usually hide things.
But it was the Sappers whose perennially adventurous spirit was immediately stirred. Certainly they would help. They would be glad to test out some of their latest mine-detecting equipment on unknown metals in enclosed areas. So long as no cost fell on the public funds, and in exchange for a detailed report on the technical results, they would produce two expert men, with equipment, for a maximum of three days. “UBIQUE” is more than a motto for the Sappers.
The sites that had been suggested were narrowed down to three. Because of its spectral name we finally chose Creake Abbey, the ruins of a twelfth-century Augustine foundation a few fields away from Nelson’s birthplace at Burnham Thorpe, and adjoining the great Norfolk estate of Holkham. Rumours of buried treasure have hung round these ruins ever since the sixteenth century, but no attempt has been made to find the treasure since a rascally unfrocked priest named William Stapleton tried to raise the spirits of the monks and make them divulge their secret in 1528, about twenty years after the Abbey had been dissolved. It is recorded that after six weeks he “returned to London disconsolate.”
The present owners, Rear-Admiral H. G. Thursfield and Mrs. Thursfield, who live in the beautiful house that merges into the ruins, were extremely sceptical but extremely kind, and in due course we assembled on the lawn that now covers the Cloister Garth of the Abbey—myself , my assistant, Mr. Peter Kirk, who provided all the documentation on the site, Captain Hough, R.E., who had come to see that his men were in good hands, Corporal Hogg of the bomb-disposal force of the Royal Engineers, and Emil Schneider, one of the German ex-P .O.W.s who are volunteers in the same dangerous trade. (He at once became “Emil the Detector.”)
During the whole of that day we worked with the locator (ERA No. 1, Mark 2), and with the more familiar Polish mine-detector Mark IV A, the machine that looks rather like a vacuum-cleaner and screams in your ear when it detects any metal down to a depth of about two-feet-six. The ERA locates only ferrous metals, but is effective to a depth of about six feet. Thus the detector is good for walls and floors and the locator for tumuli and for deep earth over original foundations.
Our hopes were high but inchoate. We didn’t know if there was a treasure. We didn’t know what metal we were looking for and we didn’t know whereabouts in the Abbey ruins and their surroundings to look for it. We covered the supposed site of the Chapter House, of the Abbot’s Lodgings, of the Cloisters and the Cloister Garth, and we quartered the grass-grown floor of the Abbey itself. Every time we got a good fix we marked the spot with a bit of paper. And then we started to dig.
In two days we dug up about thirty nails of different sizes, one frying-pan, one mole trap, one oil-drum and about a hundredweight of miscellaneous scrap-iron—all judged to be artifacts of the early twentieth or, at best, late nineteenth century. The sweat poured from our brows and our muscles ached. Our jokes about twelfth-century sardine-tins ceased at an early stage and when we even failed to find the Admiral’s lost signet-ring in the chicken run (I mean Abbot’s Lodgings) we decided to call it a day.
But somehow we weren’t as cast down as might be imagined. We comforted ourselves with the knowledge that this had been in the nature of a “dummy run.” The machines had exceeded our expectations; we had documented ourselves most carefully on the site and the history of the period, we had conscientiously investigated every possible clue. We really had hunted the treasure.
And as for the. treasure itself, we felt inclined to agree with Mark Twain that “It’s hid in mighty particular places, Huck—sometimes on islands, sometimes in rotten chests under the end of a limb of an old dead tree, just where the shadow falls at midnight; but mostly under the floor in ha’nted houses.” But certainly not, we decided, or probably not, or at any rate possibly not, at the Abbey of Creake in Norfolk.