Here’s a tale to warm hearts in these cold wintry days.
If you’ve been following the Honeydale blog you’ll know that Elliot has been feeding the birds at Honeydale as part of the Supplementary Winter Bird Feeding project. This involves broadcasting the seed across the field by hand, and the very first time Elliot did this, on a frosty December day, he threw out more than a handful of seed!
It wasn’t until he returned to the Cotswold Seeds warehouse, where he is Manager, that he realised he was no longer wearing his wedding ring. Elliot hadn’t been wearing any gloves when he spread the seed, and the icy conditions meant that the ring had been looser on his finger than usual, so he thought it likely that the ring had been lost on the farm. Elliot and his wife Harriet had celebrated their sixth wedding anniversary just the day before, so both were upset by the loss of Elliot’s band of gold and several friends and colleagues went back to the plot at Honeydale to have a hunt. The remains of the wild bird seed mix that had been sown in the spring is now all used up and patchy, with bare soil showing between the plants - which is the whole reason for carrying out the supplementary bird feeding in the first place. So hopes were high that the ring would not be too hard to find. But no luck. Until Warehouse Assistant Del came to the rescue! He contacted a friend of his, John Miller, scaffolder by trade, and also founder of the metal-detecting Recovery Service.
John arrived at Honeydale after the Christmas break and within half an hour he texted Elliot with a photograph of a ring he had discovered, lying partially concealed in the remains of the fodder radish, quinoa, millet, linseed and mustard, pretty much impossible to spot with the naked eye, but easy to find if you have the right tools.
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This is in fact the second ring John had been asked to find on a farm. Earlier last year a local farmer lost his wedding ring during lambing and John was tasked with finding, not quite a needle in a haystack, but a ring in a big barn full of straw.
