Ever stumble upon something valuable? It’s an incredible feeling.
Here is a real one. In 2019, a man took his dog, Lucky, for a walk somewhere outside the city of Bendigo, about two hours north of Melbourne, Australia. His two daughters joined him (and it’s a good thing they did).
One of his daughters kicked something as she was walking and asked his father whether what she kicked was gold.
Unable to find a jeweler, they brought the fist-sized chunk to a grocery store to weigh it, and it topped 20 ounces. Experts have since confirmed the nugget’s authenticity. The family ultimately decided to sell it and the estimated value of that chuck of gold was $24,000.
A horde of historic gold coins
Paul Raynard is a lighting engineer from West Yorkshire, England. In his spare time, he’s a detectorist — someone who hunts for treasure with a metal detector. But it wasn’t treasures he was hunting for in November 2019.
Raynard was vacationing in Ballycastle, Northern Ireland, when his friend, Michael Gwynne, asked for help finding a lost wedding ring in a field. After an hour and a half of searching with Raynard’s high-end metal detector, all they found were a horseshoe and a fivepence coin. Still no ring.
Then Raynard’s detector started beeping, and he started digging. About a foot below the soil, he pulled the first coin out, then another, and then another. “There’s millions!” he shouted to Gwynne. They pulled 84 gold coins out of the ground. Some of them dated back to the 1500s, including a rare King Henry VIII coin worth over $6,000. They brought their unburied treasure to Ulster Museum in Belfast, where it was estimated to be worth £100,000 ($125,000).
Experts have called it the biggest horde of gold coins ever found in Ireland. For Raynard it was something he dreamt of since he was a kid (though he could never find the wedding ring).