Whenever I dig in my garden, I always hope to find buried ‘treasure’ and in some of my past gardens I have done just that.

Thirty years ago, when we lived in South West London, I unearthed this ammonite at the base of a tree. I have no idea if it had been there for thousands of years, or if a previous owner had put it there.

In Kingston our garden was on the site of an old pottery, so we were always finding old tiles, broken pieces of clay pipe and blue and white china.

A resident fox at the bottom of our garden unearthed something more interesting – this lovely little clay pig, that I spotted one morning on the entrance to one of his tunnels.

And several years back my mum and dad found this when weeding the garden the day before their NGS opening. Dad promptly bagged and labelled it for display in their shed!

I found it still hanging there last year, and the same week saw a similar item on a TV programme, where an archaeologist identified it as the tusk of a wild boar. You never know what you may find when digging in your borders, so it is always worth keeping an eye out for buried treasure.