A man struck gold after digging up his wife's flower bed - as he found a Roman ring dating back thousands of years.
Mike Burke, 54, a metal detectorist, had been walking past a potential treasure trove but he was never allowed to dig it up as his wife, Julie, had forbidden him.
But one day she decided to replant the garden so gave Mike special permission to scour through the area for gold - and he seized the opportunity, as Cornwall Live reports.
He didn't expect to find anything, so was amazed when he pulled out a gold ring, believed to be a Roman intaglio ring, dating back to around the 1st or 2nd century AD.
What do you think about Mike's impressive find? Let us know in the comments...
Mike, from St Just, Cornwall, said: "I don’t normally have permission to go metal detecting in my front garden, because my wife’s got a lot of flowers out there.
"But I decided since everything was dying back and we were getting ready to rake everything up – I was like, it’s no problem, she won’t mind me going in there.
"Next month when she starts planting seeds again, I won’t be able to do it again, so it was now or never."
First Mike found a two pence coin from the ‘70s, then a halfpenny from the same decade, and a tin teddy bear that looked like it had been part of a baby’s rattle, each item as worthless as the next.
But then, he got a solid hit on his metal decetor so he started digging.
He continued: "Around six to 10 inches down, I noticed a little fleck of gold – well, something that looked like gold. I didn’t know if it was an old bottle top or something because I find them all the time. But when I pulled it out, it was a gold ring.
"Every day I look at this and I still get a shiver, you know, I just can’t imagine that I found something like this."
Mike and Julie’s terrace cottage was built in the 1870s on a riverbed, so it could be that the Roman intaglio ring was dropped, buried, or offered into the river somewhere upstream.
Mike's discovery has now been passed on to Cornwall’s Finds Liaison Officer, Tasha Fullbrook.
Mike spent 20 years in the US Army as a military police officer, including seven years as a prison guard in military prisons, and he turned to metal detecting to unwind.
He continued: "It helps me relax. I stick on the headphones – even if I’m out (at a rally) with a group of 40 other people – I stick on the headphones, go walk around a field and I’m all by myself in peace and quiet except for the beeps and bops that are coming off the metal detector."
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