Largest gold nugget found in England fails to sell
Update
The gold nugget had been expected to sell for £30,000 – £40,000 but bids had only reached £12,000 when the auction closed on Monday, 1st April. Auctioneer Ben Jones said “You always take a gamble with these things, and sometimes you just have to see how they ride and play it out, really. In the last couple of minutes there were a few bids being placed, and you sit there thinking, ‘This could go a bit more’. We’ll have a chat to the bidders and speak to the vendor, and see if there’s something we can do.”
Original article
Below is the article which we published before the auction:
The largest gold nugget ever found in England is up for auction until 1 April 2024. It was found by detectorist Richard Brook in 2023. Auctioneers Mullock Jones expect to fetch between £30,000 to £40,000.
The Find
In May 2023, Richard, who has been detecting since 1989, drove three and a half hours to an organised rally near Much Wenlock, Shropshire. He described the find:
“I actually arrived about an hour late. Everyone there had all this up-to-date kit and I bowled up with three old machines, and one of them packed in there and then. At first I just found a few rusty old tent pegs with this back-up detector which had a fading screen display. But after only 20 minutes of scanning the ground I found this nugget buried about five of six inches down in the ground. I was a perhaps bit too honest and started showing people, and then all of a sudden I had swarms of other detectorists scanning the same area.“
“The machine I was using was pretty much kaput – it was only half working. It just goes to show that it doesn’t really matter what equipment you use. If you are walking over the find and are alert enough to what might be lurking underneath the soil, that makes all the difference. I couldn’t believe it – I turned up late, was only there a matter of minutes and this treasure hunting expedition was supposed to last all day. I couldn’t look for anything else as I had the land owner, the organiser of the dig and every other detectorist around me trying to get a look at this nugget.“
Richard added that he had only recently learned that it could be the biggest found in England, which was “quite incredible really“, and he was going to split the proceeds with the landowner
Gold Nugget
It has been named Hiro’s Nugget and is being sold at a single lot online auction by Mullock Jones. Bidding closes at 6pm on 1 April 2024.
It’s something of a mystery as to why a gold nugget would be in that location. A theory is that it might be Welsh gold. An old track or road and a railway line are thought to have run near the find site, containing stone possibly distributed from Wales.