The year is 1680, the County is Gloucestershire, The Forest of Dean to be precise. Wealthy landowner Benjamin Moore is galloping across open fields on his trusty steed to meet his beloved Anne who lives towards the river Severn. All of a sudden the horse rears up and Moore is thrown to the ground despite hanging onto the reins for as long as he could. He got up and dusted himself down and thought how lucky he was that he wasn't injured. He went on to meet his beloved Anne and sometime later realised he had lost his precious gold posy ring.
Its now 3rd Oct 2015 and a metal detecting Rally is taking place over the same fields. Howie is detecting with his trusty Minelab Safari, he hopes to find a nice coin or something else of interest. All of a sudden he gets a good strong deepish signal and digs it and after a couple of spadefulls of dirt being removed from the hole he sees what could only be a very large, heavy, gold finger ring sat on the pile of dirt on his spade. He cupped the ring in his hand and straight away asked the man next to him if he had found anything. The man had not but Howie told him that he thought he had just found something nice and showed the man the ring. The man picked it up and cleaned the dirt out of the middle and said 'My god its got an inscription inside'
The heavy, thick, gold posy ring is inscribed 'In trust be just'. It has a makers mark of a T sat inside the upper part of a H inside a shield and weighs 17.2gms. This was Howies first and only gold find of any sort and the experience left him feeling amazed and elated. Was it Moore who lost it?....we will never know who lost it and we can only guess as to how the ring got there. The posy ring was handed in to the local FLO under the Treasure Act and was declared Treasure on 22nd Feb 2016. It made the ITV local news and several local newspapers. The ring dates from 1675-1725 but unfortunately the maker T.H. remains unknown. The BM is to decide a value for the ring at the end of this month.
Howie is still amazed at his find and the question is..is will his Safari find him something else as interesting?........Only time will tell.
Howie - England, UK