YORK’S coin connections with the rest of the world are being explored after money from across the globe came raining into one of the city’s museums.

The Yorkshire Museum launched an appeal for visitors to donate their spare change and now has coins from Kazakhstan, pennies from Peru and mula from Malaysia, which is now being displayed on a world map in its Roman Gallery.

The idea came from York Museums Trust’s curator of numismatics, Andrew Woods, as a way of finding out which countries York draws tourists from. He is also providing a more detailed explanation to visitors of which cash from foreign climes is particularly intriguing from a social angle.

“Returning from holiday with some small change is familiar to many people, and similarly, if you are a visitor to York, you may have coins from home with you,” said Andrew.

“The Yorkshire Museum has been demonstrating this with a display which mounts coins from all over the world on to a large map. Donations from visitors are added to the map, building a picture of where people have come from.”

The display has shown visitors are heading to York from much further afield than expected, with coins from far-flung corners of the planet such as New Zealand and Alaska.

Andrew said: “We were overwhelmed by the response to the project – donations were coming in faster than I could mount the coins on the board and we are thrilled to have received such interesting coins from so many different countries.”