Haha.. Just come across a hilarious case:
AG v Trustees of the British Museum [1903] 2 Ch. 598
The ratio was that the subject matter of the claim (Celtic gold artefacts found in Ulster) were more likely to have been deposited where they were for protection in advance of a Norse raid than given/thrown away as a votive offering.
Farwell J's questions to counsel included:
"I should like to know whether there was in fact any sea god known to the ancient Irish to whom votive offerings were ever known to have been made, and whether there were any Irish kings who had religion of a nature that would cause them to make votive offerings."
Whereupon L. Horton-Smith , as amicus curiæ, "referred the Court to the late Mr. R. R. Brash's Ogam Inscribed Monuments of the Gaedhil in the British Islands (1879) - a work dealing in the main with a series of monuments, one of which was discovered in the north of Ireland not far south of Lough Foyle itself as shewing the existence, at any rate amongst the preChristian Irish, of a water deity known as Mananan Mac Lir, answering to the Latin Neptune, the god of the sea"
Farwell J's judgement then stated inter alia:
"Notwithstanding the passage in Brash, it is by no means certain that there was any Irish sea god at all. Or that there were any Irish sea kings or chiefs who made offerings to a sea god, if any such god there were. Further, the negative inferences against the defendants' theory are of considerable weight. Votive offerings to a pagan deity would be offered in such a way as to make the most display; no one seeking to propitiate an anthropomorphic deity, who like Baal might be engaged in hunting or sleeping, would be likely to conceal two of his gifts in the hollow of a third; nor (as pointed out by Mr. Coffey in his evidence) would the donor mutilate some only of the objects as the defendants here allege to be the case. Mutilation would either be essential or an insult, and one would expect, therefore, to find all or none mutilated. Again, by virtue of what process have all these articles of such different sizes, weights, and shapes been kept together during all these years "under the whelming tide"? What magic bax had the Irish sea king which would withstand the action of the waves until the ornaments confided to its care found a safe resting-place in the soil formed on the surface of the beach when the sea receded?"