It is a fabulous story, and ripe for dramatisation: but given the National Trust has Tranmer House, and are normally happy to let out their properties for highly remunerative filming, it is odd that they chose to use a house over 130 miles away, and in a conspicuously different landscape from that of East Suffolk. It is impossible to say definitively whose burial it was, but opinion tends towards Raedwald, a king of the East Angles who died in 624 and the ship contained the ultimate treasure trove of jewels, regalia, armour, buckles and clasps, all now in the British Museum. In possibly the greatest archaeological event in English history, burial mounds were excavated and a 7th century ship-burial was discovered.

Until a Mrs Tranmer left the house to the National Trust in 1998 it was known as Sutton Hoo house, and was formerly the home of Mrs Edith Pretty, on whose land the eponymous dig took place in 1939. Harder perhaps to understand is the use of Norney Grange, a fine Arts and Crafts house in Surrey by CFA Voysey, as the body double of Tranmer House, a handsome but pretty standard Edwardian Tudor revival house in Suffolk, in Netflix’s The Dig.

The choice of locations in film and television dramas must occasionally excite the wrath of pedants: we have all seen Tudor extravaganzas filmed in Georgian palaces.

Download the dig documentary