Antiques Roadshow guest found old gold ring in | TV Shows

An Antiques Roadshow guest on the BBC version of the show brought in a mysterious gold ring that she found in a badger hole and it turned out to be a centuries-old rare and valuable love token.

The guest, Sue Gilroy, from Ridley, Kent, found the odd gold band near the entrance to a badger hole while out on a walk. She cleaned it up and gave it to her daughter Charlotte, who loves wearing it.

However, still curious about its origins, Gilroy decided to take it to be appraised on the hit BBC show.

Experts on the show told her that it is a romantic “memorial ring” or “mourning ring” dating from the early 1700s. Rings such as these were often made and worn by the bereaved after the death of a lover.

The guest’s particular ring contains a centerpiece that holds several strands of hair and a pair of initials.

While rifling around in her attic, a woman found a ring, which had a lock of braided hair inside that was “very likely” to have been famed writer Charlotte Brontë’s, according to the Brontë Society.

The woman brought it on Antiques Roadshow when the show stopped in Erddig, North Wales, and explained that it had belonged to her late father-in-law.

Like Gilroy’s ring, it also an inscription on the inside, bearing the name of the author of Jane Eyre, and the date of her death in 1855.

“I’ve got goosebumps now thinking about it. It’s got a hinge on it, and inside there’s plaited hair, I think it may be the hair of Charlotte Brontë,” the woman told the show’s jewellery expert Geoffrey Munn.

Munn said there was “very little reason to doubt” this, adding, “It was a convention to make jewellery out of hair in the 19th century.”

The expert continued, “There was a terror of not being able to remember the face and character of the person who had died. It wasn’t an uncommon thing to happen. [The ring] opens like a little biscuit tin lid, and amazingly, we see this hair work within, very finely worked and plaited hair.

“It echoes a bracelet Charlotte wore of her two sisters’ hair … So it’s absolutely the focus of the mid- to late 19th century and also the focus of Charlotte Brontë.”

Munn believed it was “utterly and completely credible” that the hair had been Brontë’s.

According to the Guardian, Ann Dinsdale, principal curator at the Brontë Society & Brontë Parsonage Museum, said they had no reason to doubt the ring had been made using the author’s hair, even though its place of origin was unknown.

Dinsdale said the ring would be a “lovely addition” to the museum’s collection, funds permitting.

Without the hair, Munn said he would have valued the ring at £25 ($33). However, with the hair and the inscription, he valued it at £20,000 ($26,000).