As fashions went, for the Celts, hair was big news. Our own Queen of the Iceni, Boudica, is almost always portrayed with a glorious mane of rich, reddish hair billowing behind her as she rode her chariot into battle against the Romans.

Hairy puzzle: Sue White’s drawing shows a typical Iceni warrior of the Boudica period, complete with luxuriant moustache.

And when she looked around the men of her world, she would probably have seen some fine male heads of hair too.

In some parts of the country, men of the Celtic tribes, like the women, are known to have worn their hair long, sometimes plaited, or brushed back to look like a horse’s mane.

Some Celtic warriors used a lime wash in their hair. If it was cut short they would then be able to spike it up like some ancient punk. This would add to their awesome appearance that they hoped would intimidate their enemies.

They are said to have favoured facial hair too. When artists draw Celtic warriors they typically portray them stripped to the waist, decorated with woad and tattoos, and sporting luxuriant moustaches.

This was their battle look though. In everyday life the Celts wore close-fitting trousers covered with a colourfully dyed woven tunic that was belted at the waist. Warm cloaks would be fastened at the shoulder with a metal brooch.

Certainly it was a new image to the eyes of the Roman invaders, who were used to wearing plain togas back at home.

The facial hair of the Celts at the end of the Iron Age and the start of the Romano-British period made a big impression on the classical writer Diodorus Siculus.

He wrote of them: “When they are eating, the moustache becomes entangled in the food and when they are drinking, the drink passes as it were through a sort of strainer”.

All of which helps us to build up a picture of these tough people who inhabited our island, and indeed our own area, in the 800 or so years from 750 BC that we know as the Iron Age.

One of the so-called West Norfolk moustaches.

Archaeological finds from this period have helped us discover many aspects of what life was like for them then.

We know this was a very important evolutionary time in the story of our country. By the conclusion of the Iron Age, people were using coins in their trading, living in larger communities and trying to improve their homes and their diets.

Finds of pottery have shown us that typically pots were handmade during the Iron Age. Other archaeological evidence has led us to believe the people of the Iron Age were living in communities in houses with wood and wattle walls and thatched roofs.

Many examples of their craft work have been found and we have even been able to uncover what sorts of foods were being eaten then, including forms of bread and porridge.

But a handful of finds from that period have left Norfolk archaeologists intrigued. These are what have now been dubbed the West Norfolk Moustaches.

A half dozen or so little bronze items have turned up among discoveries, primarily from metal detectorists. And just recently they have been linked together, as archaeologists began to spot the similarities in shape coupled with the closeness of the sites where they were found.

Only a few centimetres long, they seem to have been fashioned to look like little moustaches. Some have striations running along them that seem to indicate hair, and some are riveted as though they would have been attached to something or someone.

Sue White, Norfolk archaeological illustrator and interpreter, has been asked to draw the items. She explained: “It is only fairly recently that they have been recognised as a group of finds.

“No-one seems to have done any research into the significance of these moustaches in the Iron Age, but facial hair has long been symbolic of masculinity. It is possible that they were to do with some sort of rite of passage for younger boys who perhaps didn’t yet have moustaches, or it could have been that they were something ceremonial that was worn by the men.

“Maybe even, they were something that the women wore to look more like their men!”

A more fanciful depiction of the hairy Iceni.

The moustaches first came to the attention of archaeological experts when they were brought to Norfolk’s Identification and Recording Service in the Archaeology Unit at Gressenhall.

Originally they were thought to have perhaps been a form of decorative pommel that was fixed to the end of a sword handle.

But as the man in charge of the service there, Dr Andrew Rogerson, explained there had been just one other mention, to his knowledge, of similar “enigmatic” items, which was in a book about the Salisbury Hoard by archaeologist Ian Stead.

Now they began to fall into some sort of a pattern, with examples appearing from around the King’s Lynn and Downham Market area, including Barton Bendish, Methwold, Gayton and Runcton Holme.

So what were they used for? Intriguingly they have all been slightly different so far. One is a quite tiny but rather bulbous moustache, while others have been larger and thinner. Could that mean they were designed to represent the style of moustache of the bearer? Would they have been a token of identification? Might they have been fixed on to a warrior’s clothing or shield?

One idea even linked them to the gruesome habit of cutting off and displaying a few heads near the entrances to their villages as trophies of battles and warnings of the might of those who lived within. Perhaps they were attached to the skulls after decay had stripped away the features to the bone.

Whatever the origins of these strange little relics of the Iron Age, archaeologists hope that some day that crucial clue will appear from out of the ground to solve the mystery of the West Norfolk Moustaches.

Hidden Norfolk home page