A woman has been reunited with the wedding ring she lost digging cabbages after it was found by a metal detector – 40 YEARS later.
Green-fingered Brenda Caunter, 62, was tending vegetables in her allotment in 1972 when the golden band slipped off her finger.
Brenda and her husband Dave, 69, desperately scoured the muddy plot for days but eventually gave up and bought a replacement.
They thought nothing more of it until this week when Dave strolled past the same area – now fields – and spotted a neighbour with a metal detector.
The amateur treasure hunter was looking for medieval coins but Dave left a description of the long-lost jewellery and roughly where it was lost.
He was then left stunned when the neighbour rang him days later to say he’d found the nine carat ring.
Incredibly it was still in near-perfect condition despite being buried beneath the soil for 41 years.
Dave said: “Back then the ring cost me a fortune. When Brenda told me she’d lost it we went back up there with our own metal detectors.
”But they were not nearly as good as they are now and we didn’t find it. Eventually we had to buy a replacement.
“I was going out in the village and saw him up in the field and when I saw his wife I asked her ‘what’s he up to in the field with that metal detector? Tell him if he finds a ring, it belongs to Brenda’.
“Then I had a phone call telling me that he had found a ring. I couldn’t believe it after all these years.”
Dave had saved up to buy the love token for Brenda before the pair tied the knot in September 1969.
She had only been wearing it for three years when she lost it while uprooting veg near their home on the outskirts of Mawnan Smith, Cornwall.
But the treasure hunter managed to find the ring in almost exactly the same spot where Brenda had dropped it.
The couple took the ring to a local jewellers to have a small crack repaired but it’s now as good as new and back on Brenda’s finger.
She said: “I was working in the field when I took my gloves off, and that’s probably when it came off.
“When we got the phone call to say it had been found I didn’t know what to say.”
The finder of the ring, who wishes to remain anonymous, said: “It was in absolutely perfect condition, despite the number of years it had been there.
“I’m interested in history and I have often found medieval coins which are absolutely fascinating. That’s why I was up there.”
