Two news stories this year make our present preoccupations seem utterly ephemeral, for they both predate these concerns, and will outlast them.

The first was the revelation that all sweet apples in the world, without exception, are descended from the fruit of a single group of trees in Kazakhstan. The second came last week, with the discovery of the vast find of the Anglo-Saxon treasures in Staffordshire.

There are many wonderful aspects to these revelations, not the least of them being that both survived the perils and the horrors of modernism. Kazakhstan, formerly a slave-republic of the Soviet Union, was nearly destroyed by collectivist agriculture, as communist planners uprooted the giant natural orchards in the Tian Shen, or the Celestial Mountains.

The vast fruit forests in which the sweet apple had uniquely developed were reduced to a few secret woodlands. But they have survived, and a DNA analysis of all known apples by the botanist Barrie Juniper (who has heard all possible amusing variants on his name, thank you) revealed a single indisputable connection. There was but one founding group of apple trees: the orchards of Tian Shen.

That is one wonderful, majestic, towering story, thank you; but then along came the Staffordshire discovery, overshadowing all other archaeological finds for at least a generation. It might indeed be the most significant find ever in these islands from the Dark Ages - though how hollow that term is beginning to sound. And again, all might have been lost, through agricultural machinery, or industrialisation or the extensive mining, all of which have ruined so much of that part of England

In the 1,500 items in the Staffordshire trove were 84 sword pommels, three crosses, several helmets and 1.5kg of gold. It should not be necessary to find an Irish angle to make this discovery electrifying: but this era was (give or take) also that of the great 'insular' art - as in the books of Lindisfarne and of Kells - that was created by Irish monks in their homeland, or in ecclesiastical colonies elsewhere. Almost nothing found from that era, in either Britain or Ireland, is without significance for the other islands in this archipelago. Nor is this just a local matter: one of the Staffordshire artefacts was made in Constantinople.

Both tales appeal to something deep in our psyche, for they speak to an almost universal belief in a lost world, the Garden of Eden. And though the Bible does not refer to an 'apple', merely a 'fruit', the two terms were often synonymous in any language. For the apple is the founding fruit. For example, the Latin for apple is 'malum', and the Latin for peach is 'Persicum malum', meaning 'apple from Persia'. Mangle 'persicum' over time, and you end up with the word 'peach'. Moreover, we can see in that sinless and celestial sea of Tian Shen, mankind's first orchard, on the very edge of Eurasian civilisation.

It gave the sweet apple east to Cathay and west to the Aegean, thereby entering the myths of the world, and transforming human diet and human health. Mastery of the apple was one of the keys to civilisation.

And we can probably examine the secrets of the lost trove of Staffordshire for ever, and not find an answer. Yet it provides clear and irrefutable truth of the magisterial skills of those ancient goldsmiths and silversmiths and swordsmiths.

Their glittering metals furthermore remind us of the even more ancient myths that, almost alone, endured through those times: of Ulysses, of Cuchulainn, of the Knights of The Red Branch or of The Round Table.

We used to dismiss such legends as the fireside fantasies of heathen, woad-covered Jutes, or rude, rug-headed kerns: but more recently, we have been given brief glimpses of the beauty that the Dark Ages created. No royal court alone could have produced such things merely because kingly appetite desired them: it required an entire value-system to have trained so many smiths in such skills, and over many generations.

So in that field outside Birmingham was buried an artistic apex of an intensely cultured civilisation, of which today we know almost nothing.

The past is a strangely captivating place. Though its tales are all done, it holds its secrets close. Unlike the mysteries of today's affairs, these stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. It is up to us to find all three: yet the bewitching certainty is that we never shall. And in that failure are the tantalising glories of narrative, the gap between what we know and what we want to know, that we fill with imagination, and often call theory.

This is true for all knowledge, from scientific to historical; though, admittedly, there are not many enchanting fireside tales to relate about the peculiar orbits of the electron or of Pluto. But the legends of how the apple was brought from Kazakhstan to the sweet meadows of Clonmel, or how the shield bosses of burnished gold came to be buried in a Staffordshire Chase, why, therein lie all the lays of ancient Rome, and the founding glue of that thing we call society.