A farmer from County Westmeath who helped discover two 4,000-year-old Bronze Age axheads has come forward after a national appeal. 

The two axheads were anonymously sent to the National Museum of Ireland last month in a porridge box accompanied by a letter stating that they had been found using a metal detector. 

The museum issued an appeal for information about the "exciting" and "significant" discovery, stating that the exact location of the discovery was necessary to understand more about the axes' use. 

The museum said the axes could have had a number of purposes, including "ritualistic" and "supernatural" uses. 

Thomas Dunne, a farmer from Coralstown in Westmeath, has now come forward to state the axheads were found by chance while he was cutting silage at a silage field in Banagher.

"I was cutting silage one day and a bit of metal fell off a mower," Dunne told the Irish Times. 

A farmer in Co Westmeath has said he thought 4,000-year-old Early Bronze Age axeheads found in his field were old horse ploughs, or scrap. Thomas Dunne said the discovery was made during silage cutting in Coralstown https://t.co/WbMFo5oERl

— RTÉ News (@rtenews) July 25, 2024

Dunne said he started looking for the piece of metal because he was worried it would be caught up in the silage harvester and said he enlisted the help of a local man with a metal detector to help him find it. 

"I got a man in with a metal detector to look for it and that’s how it (the axheads) was found. It was on the side of a field underneath a row of huge beech trees; there would have been ancient forts on the land around here. I didn’t even know it was found at the time and he thought it might have been an old horseshoe or something like that, but he sent it off anyway to the museum," Dunne told the Irish Times. 

Dunne added that he was shocked to learn of the significance of the find when national and international news outlets began covering the story. 

"I only found out about it a week after it had been in the news and I was surprised to say the least; it’s absolutely mad when you think about it," Dunne said.