Couple find ancient gold coins under floorboards worth £754,000
A couple who uncovered a treasure trove of old gold coins underneath their floorboards have auctioned them off for a whopping total of £754,000.
The anonymous couple first found the stash all the way back in 2019 after deciding to renovate their 18th century home and making the monumental discovery.
Underneath their floorboards they found what they first thought was part of an electrical cable, though it turned out to be a pot about the size of a can of coke.
Popping it open they were amazed to find a secret stash of gold coins from the 17th and 18th centuries that would have been worth plenty back in their heyday too.
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Dubbed 'The Ellerby Area Hoard' for the town of Ellerby, East Yorkshire, where the couple live, original ownership of the coins was traced back to a merchant family from Hull called the Fernley-Maisters.
Depicting monarchs from James I (the one Guy Fawkes tried to blow up) through to George I, the couple found history and fortune had been hiding right beneath their feet.
Auctioneer Gregory Edmund said he'd 'never see an auction like this again' after a whole host of coin collectors paid a pretty sizeable fortune for their own slice of the pot of gold.
He said the discovery of the money was '120 years of English history' sealed up in a pot about the same size as a can of coke.
According to auctioneers Spink & Son, the most valuable item in the pot was an imperfectly minted coin from 1720 which brought in a bid of £62,400 by itself.
In total there were 264 gold coins packed into the pot making for an incredible discovery when the lucky couple found it beneath their floor.
The collection of coins was sold off in bits and pieces to different collectors and the couple made much more money than anyone was expecting.
The pot of gold's value had been estimated to be around £200,000 to £250,000, but over all the different auctions selling off the shiny shrapnel they fetched a total price of around £754,000.
The stash of coins would have been pretty valuable back in their day too, with auction house Spink & Son indicating that they'd have been worth around £100,000 in modern money.
Considering it was a pot of gold coins, you'd have hoped that they would have been worth something those few hundred years ago.
Who knows, maybe just beneath your own floorboards there's a trove of hidden treasure just waiting to be uncovered and auctioned off for a fortune?
It's probably best not to go tearing up your house just on the off chance there is, though.
Joe Harker