This composite gold and garnet-inlaid pendant is a masterpiece of Kentish craftmanship. The primary material used to make it is gold. The source of the gold was probably imported Frankish coinage that had been melted down to be remade into distinctively Kentish jewellery. The garnets probably originally came from the distant island of Sri Lanka (see ‘Kent’s Diverse Past’ for more information on the long-distance trade of these gems during the sixth and seventh centuries). The large now-empty cells that form a cruciform arrangement within the central area of the pendant would have once been filled with a white calcite material, probably shell, thus creating a striking contrast with the gold, dark red garnets. The pendant was edged with beaded and twisted gold wire and the suspension loop is also decorated with filigree. The overall design of the pendant closely relates it to the series of composite disc brooches produced in east Kent during the first half of the seventh century AD. Indeed, it is effectively such a brooch made into a pendant. It would have been made somewhere in east Kent, possibly at Faversham where there is some evidence for a concentration of high status craftworking from the mid-sixth century onwards. Such production would almost certainly have been carried out at the behest of the Kentish royal dynasty. The pendant was discovered during the construction of Cranmer House, on the corner of London Road and Prince’s Way, in the St Dunstan’s area of Canterbury, in the winter of 1982. This was the former site of Westgate Court Farm, situated about half a kilometre north west of the Westgate of the city. A large Roman cremation cemetery existed on the site, but some later features of early Anglo-Saxon date were encountered at its western end. One of these, feature 70, may have been a disturbed inhumation grave and it was from the fill of this possible grave that the pendant was found. The grave (if it was such) would almost certainly have originally contained a range of other artefacts, including other items of dress such as beads and perhaps other pendants (though it is likely this pendant was the most splendid and formed the centre-piece of the necklace). However, it appears the grave was badly disturbed or perhaps deliberately robbed during the Anglo-Saxon period, perhaps not many years after the burial. Whilst we will never know what else it contained, we can only be thankful that this wonderful object survived to be found by the Trust’s archaeologists.