Detectorist finds record gold nugget after turning up late and with a faulty machine

A 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 threeand-a-half hours from his home in Somerset last May to join an organised expedition on farmland in the Shropshire Hills

Despite having a faulty metal detector, Mr Brock, who has been treasure hunting for 35 years, discovered the find of his life – a 64.8g gold nugget which is now set to fetch at least £30,000 at auction.

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 ... I actually arrived about an hour late, thinking I’d missed the action.

“At first I just unearthed a few rusty old tent pegs with this back-up detector which had a fading screen display, said the father-of-four. “But after only 20 minutes of scanning the ground I found this nugget buried about five of six inches down.”

He added: “The machine I was using was pretty much kaput – it was only half working. It just goes to show ... 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 there. There is also much rock that originally came from Wales – a country known to be once rich in gold

The only bigger gold nuggets discovered in Britain were found in Britain have been either in Wales or Scotland.

The Douglas Nugget found in Perthshire weighed 85.7g, another from the shores of Anglesey weighed 97.12g and the Reunion Nugget also found in Scotland in 2019 weighed 121.3g.

Mullock Jones is offering the nugget for sale in a timed auction which began last weekend and runs until April 1 with an estimate of £30,000.

Mr Brock will split whatever the gold sells for with the land owner.