Edith, however, had travelled extensively and had seen excavations of the Nile Valley whilst out in Egypt. Her father, Robert Dempster, was a keen amateur archaeologist and had himself revealed a Cistercian abbey in the grounds of their family home at Vale Royal.
Edith must have been intrigued by the strange mounds on her land at Sutton Hoo. She may have drawn on her early experiences with archaeology and recognised the need to have the mounds expertly excavated.
Keen to know if anything lay beneath the mounds, Edith spoke to local historian, Mr Redstone at Woodbridge Flower Show in 1937. He got in touch with the Curator of Ipswich Museum, Mr Maynard, who recommended local archaeologist Basil Brown.
Basil started work in June 1938. He was assisted by Sutton Hoo estate labourers, Ben Fuller and Tom Sawyer during the day and the under-gardener’s son, Leslie Buckle in the evening. They excavated three of the mounds - which he had called tumuli A, D and E - discovering the remains of a ship burial in one, but all three had otherwise been completely robbed of everything else. We now know that ship burial as Mound Two.
The following spring, Basil, this time assisted by William Spooner the gamekeeper and gardener John Jacobs, started excavating again – this time, on the biggest mound in the field, now known as Mound One. A few weeks later, they found iron rivets from the hull of a 27 metre long Anglo-Saxon ship, becoming the second of only three known Anglo-Saxon ship burials in England, with the third located just down the road at Snape.