Ok Storytime!!
Well, on sunday night I was doing some more searching on some of the 'unfound' searches, and decided to have a go at August-2 (again).
Previously I had looked up all the locations claiming to be merlins burial place and kind of shortlisted them, one of the favourites being Bardsey Island off of the Llyn peninsula in North Wales.
I had thought that maybe the coin was on the island, and looking at pics from the island there are a lot of old buildings that had potential, but no pics that showed an alcove like in the picture clue.
So on sunday I started looking at pictures from the places used to launch boats taking visitors to the island. This led me to a picture on Flickr of one such cove, and I noticed that the author had also posted a collection of pics taken from walking around the Llyn peninsula. So I started flicking through the pics, and there in silhouette was what looked like a ruined Chimney...
Straight away I thought, aha, maybe the alcove is a fireplace....
So I looked at the name on that photo (Ysgaden), and did a new search using that name.
It turned up one pic, quite a dark one, but it showed the ruined chimney more clearly, and behold! I could make out the little fireplace/alcove in the wall!
Close inspection convinced me that they were one and the same, so I located it on a map etc and we decided to go and search!
At first we thought about going on Monday morning like good sensible people, but then we got a bit overexcited and just decided to go right away!
So off we set at 2am, foregoing sleep. It was wonderful traveling with few cars on the road and we made good time.
We arrived a while after sunrise, and sure enough, there was the chimney, and we wasted no time in looking for the coin.
My first thought was to look in the fireplace, but the main flue was blocked off.
However, there were a few cracks and holes in the stones, so I started feeling inside them and YAY! there it was!
It was wedged in quite far, and it took me a bit of fingertip scrabbling to get it free.
The coin had no bag and was little bit tarnished from being in such a 'seaside' location, but we were so pleased and elated, coz all the time on the way we were convincing ourselves that someone would have beaten us there.
We don't have an Isis yet, this will be our first one, so we are looking forward to having a go at opening it!
I have posted a short video of me retrieving the coin on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiVQEL5cs_wHere are also some photos of the location etc. Thanx for reading!