'Amazing staff' help find lost engagement ring in haystack

A mother who lost a ring in a huge straw pit at a farm park has praised the "amazing staff" who helped find it.

Lynn Stevenson's wedding and engagement rings slipped off as she played with her daughter at Briarlands Farm near Stirling.

The wedding ring was quickly relocated but staff then sieved through piles of straw and used metal detectors to locate its partner.

Mrs Stevenson told BBC Radio Scotland she had almost given up hope.

Speaking on the Newsdrive programme, the mother-of-two from Glasgow said: "It was quite cold on Saturday and I felt them come off my finger and they hit off my boot so I thought I knew where they were.

"My husband found the wedding ring quite quickly, within about 20 minutes, but we couldn't find the engagement ring anywhere that day."

Farm staff borrowed metal detectors and donned head torches as it got dark to carry on looking through the afternoon and into the evening.

Mrs Stevenson then returned to the farm on Sunday to continue the search with the help of Mary Inglis, who runs Briarlands.

"We were sieving through the straw, putting handfuls into buckets and waiting to see if we could hear it," she said.

"I did start to think it might never be found, but we just kept going.

"Mary then stuck her metal detector into one little corner, which would have been the last bit we would have looked in, and it beeped.

"I figured it might be another coin, because we had found a few, but then it plopped into the bucket."

Mrs Stevenson said: "I was just so relieved and happy to find it. The staff could not have done more to help. They were fantastic."

And she said she "probably should" now think about getting her rings resized.