A BRITISH amateur treasure hunter hit gold when he found an Iron Age collar worth more than STG350,000 ($820,000) in a field.
Maurice Richardson, who unearthed the 2200-year-old gold collar near Newark, central England, will not get to keep it but has received an undisclosed reward and his lucky find has been acquired by his local museum.
"I was only in the field because a customer kept me late," Richardson, a tree surgeon, told the Guardian newspaper.
"Normally I`d never want to go into this field because a plane crashed there in the last war, and the whole place is littered with bits of metal."
Mr Richardson`s first discovery in the field was a piece of World War II scrap metal but as he bent down to throw it away, his metal detector emitted a louder beep.
It was then that he discovered the collar, which was hailed by a leading expert as one of the most important finds of its kind in years.
"It`s a fabulous thing, the best Iron Age find in 50 years," JD Hill, head of the British Museum in London`s Iron Age department, told the paper.
"When I first saw a picture of it, I thought somebody was pulling my leg because it is so like the Sedgeford torc in our collection that it must have been made by the same hand.
"What is fascinating about it is that it turned up where no torc should be - to put it mildly, the Newark region is not known for major high-status Iron Age finds."
The BBC reported that the necklace was the most expensive single piece of treasure found by a member of the public in more than a decade.
"I was only in the field because a customer kept me late," Richardson, a tree surgeon, told the Guardian newspaper.
"Normally I`d never want to go into this field because a plane crashed there in the last war, and the whole place is littered with bits of metal."
Mr Richardson`s first discovery in the field was a piece of World War II scrap metal but as he bent down to throw it away, his metal detector emitted a louder beep.
It was then that he discovered the collar, which was hailed by a leading expert as one of the most important finds of its kind in years.
"It`s a fabulous thing, the best Iron Age find in 50 years," JD Hill, head of the British Museum in London`s Iron Age department, told the paper.
"When I first saw a picture of it, I thought somebody was pulling my leg because it is so like the Sedgeford torc in our collection that it must have been made by the same hand.
"What is fascinating about it is that it turned up where no torc should be - to put it mildly, the Newark region is not known for major high-status Iron Age finds."
The BBC reported that the necklace was the most expensive single piece of treasure found by a member of the public in more than a decade.
