Wales' national museums are missing almost 2,000 items

St Fagans Castle is one of the Grade I listed buildings under the care of Museum Wales

Almost 2,000 items including a sword, axe and javelin head from the Bronze Age are missing at the national museum.

Roman ceramic tiles, a bracelet, finger ring and bow brooch dating back to about the 2nd Century are also missing.

Museum Wales said no items of high financial value have been identified as lost or missing but was unable to provide pictures of missing items.

BBC Wales' freedom of information request revealed a total of 1,921 missing items.

Museum Wales said it has already spent 30 years documenting all the missing items on its digital database from paper records, and expects the project to take another 20 years to complete.

Flint tool, coins and medals

A Mesolithic flint microlith is missing - a small stone which was a characteristic flint tool from the Mesolithic period in the UK, dating from as long ago as 7,000 BC.

A number of coins are listed as missing, such as a Roman coin of emperor Caracalla and a 16th Century Henry VIII groat (silver coin) but the museum, known as Amgueddfa Cymru in Welsh, said "a significant proportion of these are duplicate items and there are better quality examples within our collection".

Medals on the missing list include one from Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and another from the coronation of Edward VII in 1902.

Also missing are a medieval iron key, "classical pottery" vessels, and eight 17th and 18th Century clay pipe heads.

National Museum Cardiff is in the heart of Cardiff's civic centre

Museum Wales consists of seven national museums, with collections from around the world.

There are 5.3 million items in the national collection, including paintings and fine art as well as the library and archives, many housed in Grade I listed buildings such as National Museum Cardiff and St Fagans Castle, Cardiff.

Since 2017, following a review of the museum's processes, 16 items have been reported to the police as stolen from the slate museum in Llanberis, Gwynedd or St Fagans in Cardiff.

Museum Wales said the 16 were "domestic items of low financial value which were removed by visitors from our historic houses".

More than half of the total of missing items - 1,153 - were from St Fagans, a 100-acre site where 40 original buildings from different historical periods have been re-erected, although the losses go back to its foundation in the late 1940s.

Items missing from St Fagans include fencing equipment, a number of fish hooks, but the majority are household crockery.

First Minister Mark Drakeford visited the National Slate Museum in Llanberis in 2021 when the slate landscape of north-west Wales became a Unesco World Heritage Site

The Welsh government said the care and management of its collections was a matter for Museum Wales.

"In doing so, it works to professional standards, meeting the requirements of the UK wide Museum Accreditation Scheme," they said.

Museum Wales said most items recorded as "missing (as officially recorded" would have been misplaced, wrongly documented or come astray from their labels, and most will be recovered as it works through the whole collection.

No items have been identified as missing from the art collection, nor from the natural science collection "although there is an ongoing programme of review in relation to research loans".

For 2023-24, the Welsh government is providing Museum Wales with £27.2m of revenue funding for operational costs and £5m of capital funding for longer-term investments.

Entry to the museums is free.

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