Small Silver Coin Possibly Viking

@baldy, first welcome to CCF. Second, that is an interesting coin that you have there. I agree that it looks to be Viking or perhaps early English. I'm looking in my copy of Spinks to find a good match and will let you know if I find anything.

Added: ok I'm giving up for the night. I didn't see anything in Spinks nor at wildwinds.com that matched up with your coin: a left facing portrait that protrudes into the inscription on the obv and a small/medium cross pattee on the rev. My best deciphering of the inscriptions is SIHTBC REX DIFLNI on the obv and +HnOLFMOWIRHALH on the rev. Lots to decipher as I can only find one king whose name starts with the letter S (Svein). Despite the degenerate legend, this really feels like an English silver penny from the late 900s AD.

Wow
Thank you the pictures I was looking at of the coin was directing me towards silkbeard but with the small cross on the reverse side was really confusing me,all the pictures are detailing the long cross.
I agree that it needs to be sent to an expert for detailed investigation.
Many many thanks for the help.
Pete.

Photo's of what I am talking about... you can see the similarity of design to the King Aethelstan side.








Looking in Spink I do see lots of Northumbria and Viking coiniage looks similar, the strange thing on yours is on the other side your portrait is not separated from the motto by any sort of line... most of the coins seem to feature this whereas yours does not... A bit of a head scratcher.

The first issues with the Sihtric obverse (while he was alive and out plundering the rest of Ireland) were of good enough quality, and of sufficient weight, to pass as currency; the engraving was generally done with a degree of skill and knowledge, with fully readable legends and some fine details. These facts, combined with the fairly-accurate imitations of the Aethelred II silver pennies, indicate that the Dublin engravers and moneyers must have been able to at least partially read Old English, or were perhaps English themselves.

(Remember, this is a time when languages spoken by the people involved included Danish, Wessex/Mercian flavors of Old English, Old Norse & Irish Gaelic; in Dublin, by the time these coins were struck, Old Irish had already taken hold and displaced the Scandinavian languages.)

The coins of the earlier issues have a degree of "heft" to them and feel like, well, actual silver pennies; think early-mid 2nd c. Roman AR denarii.

A Dublin die-sinker's imitation of an AEII English reverse with a Wirral mint makes sense as well, since it was "just" across the Irish Sea and pennies minted there would have likely been back and forth in trade or with military campaigns on both sides; the Wirral had been heavily contested by the Danes, Norsemen, and Norse Gaels (Hiberno-Norse) from the 800s off and on.

As the coinage series progressed, and the original moneyers had since gone, the posthumous coinage was subject to frequent debasement, not as much by tampering with the alloy, but by reducing the planchet thickness. The die-sinkers went from being able to at least partially comprehend the legends, to being able to draw the characters but not read them, to being unable to comprehend them at all.

By the late 11th & early 12th c. the "mints" in Dublin were turning out barely-recognizable and nearly paper-thin slivers of metal with nonsense legends or just random lines, devices that had gone from somewhat passable imitations to looking like a child's stick-figure drawings, and bizarre symbols and characters added to both sides of the coin that didn't look like anything at all and didn't seem to serve any purpose.

If you think the coin is from circumstances likely to merit a consideration as authentic (i.e. metal-detector find, hoard recovery, past owner or seller provenance) -- know that for every "real" example, there must be a hundred or a thousand fakes, museum copies, tributes, replicas, and forgeries, of quality varying from laughably bad to shockingly good. On the other hand, sometimes the "real" coins were so poorly engraved and struck that it's hard NOT to assume that they're ridiculous counterfeits. Matching your design to known designs to the plates in Parsons' book or on the DFD website or in museum and auction catalogues is a good start, as is seeing what the weight is, and the diameter and thickness of the flan. Those steps alone will help you eliminate a large number of fakes right off the bat. If you can find something reasonably similar in weight, diameter and design, it might be worth professional authentication. Otherwise, it's at least a neat conversation piece ;)

I certainly quite agree with @Spence
It's had my head done in!
There is a significant chance that it's a fake.
I have contacted a museum to ask if they would have a look at it.
I'm not holding out much hope but just supposing it would be something rather special.
When I get more information I will certainly post on here.

Many thanks to you all.

Pete.