Staffordshire Moorlands Pan

The Staffordshire Moorlands Pan, sometimes known as the Ilam Pan, is a 2nd-century AD enamelled bronze trulla with an inscription naming four of the forts of Hadrian's Wall. Its decoration uses coloured vitreous enamel, in antiquity a speciality of Celtic art, in ornamental forms that provide a very rare link between Iron Age and Early Medieval "Celtic" art.

It weighs 132.5 g, and is 47 mm high with a maximum diameter of 94 mm, and is 54 mm around the outside of the base.^[1] It has been suggested that in addition to its functional role as a cooking or serving vessel it may have been a 'souvenir' of Hadrian's Wall, made for a soldier who had served there. It may have been made as a decorative pan and was then customised by having an inscription added later (using an engraved, rather than relief-cast, inscription as in other enamelled objects of this type).^[2]

It was found in June 2003 in Ilam parish, Staffordshire (well to the south of Hadrian's Wall), by metal-detectorists, and, in 2005, was bought jointly by the Tullie House Museum in Carlisle, the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent and London's British Museum, with the help of a grant of £112,200 from the Heritage Lottery Fund. It is a find of great national and international significance.^[3] The pan rotates between a number of locations, including the joint owning museums and another museum on Hadrian's Wall.