A veteran metal detectorist hit the jackpot when he turned up late to a group dig only to stumble across the largest gold nugget ever found in England after just 20 minutes of searching.
Richard Brock, 67, travelled three-and-a-half hours from his home in Somerset in May 2023 to join an organised expedition on farmland in the Shropshire Hills.
Despite his metal detector not in full working order, Mr Brock, who has been metal detecting for 35 years, discovered the biggest find of his life after unearthing a 64.8-gram (about 2.28 ounces) golden nugget.
It is now set to fetch at least £30,000 at auction and is believed to be the biggest find of its kind under English soil.
Mr Brock said: “I have been detecting since 1989 and decided to join the trip as a similar previous one to Australia was cancelled during the pandemic.
“So I drove three-and-a-half hours to Shropshire and I actually arrived about an hour late, thinking I’d missed the action.
“At first, I just found a few rusty old tent pegs with this back-up detector that had a fading screen display.
“But after only 20 minutes of scanning the ground I found this nugget buried about five or six inches down in the ground.
“I was, perhaps, a bit too honest and started showing people, and then all of a sudden I had swarms of other detectorists scanning the same area.
He added: “The machine I was using was pretty much kaput. It was only half working. It just goes to show that it doesn’t really matter what equipment you use.
“If you are walking over the find and are alert enough to what might be lurking underneath the soil, that makes all the difference.”
How a gold nugget ended up in the Shropshire Hills, near Much Wenlock, remains a mystery.
The area is an ancient landscape once under a prehistoric ocean and hunters often find remnants of coral in the area.
There was also a large amount of rock that originally came from Wales, in which gold and copper were mined extensively during the Bronze Age.
Mr Brock’s discovery was made on a site believed to have been an old track or road with railway lines running through, containing stone possibly distributed from Wales.
The only previous bigger examples in Britain have been found in either Wales and Scotland.
The Douglas Nugget found in Perthshire weighed 85.7g, another from the shores of Anglesey weighed 97.12g and The Reunion Nugget found in Scotland in 2019 weighed 121.3g.
Mullock Jones, the auctioneer, is offering the nugget for sale in a timed auction which began last weekend and runs until April 1. The nugget is estimated to sell for £30,000.
Mr Brock has said he will split the proceeds of the auction with the landowner.
