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Epoch Times:

A link to Ireland’s medieval past was located in a shed after a chance encounter during Granard’s Heritage Week this summer.

That find consisted of an authentic, stunningly well-preserved 800-year-old chain mail vest—called a hauberk—discovered fully intact.

Bartle D’Arcy, general manager of local heritage center Granard Knights & Conquests, was wearing a replica hauberk mid-August when some locals approached him and said they had one just like it in their shed.

“I was wearing a chainmail coif when some people from the locality in Longford approached me and said they had some of that in their shed, which utterly amazed me,” D’Arcy told The Epoch Times.

“I said ‘what do you mean you have some of that in your shed?’”

Three days later, they brought the vest in, which had been kept in a bucket for two years after it was found by an excavator doing drainage work.

“We thought we had a fragment, but we have the entire hauberk,” he said in a statement published by Longford Leader.

The chainmail vest is believed to date back to 1172 when the Normans arrived in Longford, linking it to Risteárd de Tiúit and construction of the timber-frame castle on the Motte in 1199, said the center’s education officer Déirdre Orme.

“We think it’s related to the Motte because chain mail is expensive,” D’Arcy added.

RTWT

HT: Bird Dog.