A mother has thanked farm staff who helped find her diamond engagement ring after she lost it in a huge straw pit on a family day out.
Lynn Stevenson, her husband and four-year-old daughter Arya were in the straw area at Briarlands Farm near Stirling when she realised both her wedding and engagement ring had slipped off her finger.
Her husband David quickly found the wedding ring but there was no sign of its partner.
The couple, who also have one-year-old son Arthur, spent the rest of the afternoon sifting through the straw helped by staff, with no luck.
Mrs Stevenson, 35, said: "I had been in the pit for a while playing with my daughter and my husband started to brush down the woolly cardigan I had on and I felt my ring come off my finger.
"As soon as they were in the straw pit they were just gone, we could not see where they were. It was like a needle in a haystack.
"We went to the reception to see if they had buckets and they gave us a couple of buckets so I started helping my husband to search, then some staff came up to help."
Farm staff borrowed metal detectors and donned head torches as it got dark to carry on looking through the afternoon and into the evening on Saturday November 4.
The following morning Mrs Stevenson, who lives in Glasgow, returned to the farm and was overjoyed to find the ring with the help of Mary Inglis, who runs Briarlands.
She said: "On the Sunday morning it was just me and Mary and we were searching for a couple of hours. The pile of straw was getting smaller and smaller and then we were onto the last bit of straw we would have been looking through.
"Suddenly the metal detector beeped. We kept going for ten minutes, we were trying to sieve the straw to try to hear if it plopped into the bucket.
"Then Mary pulled out a handful and it plopped into the bucket.
"I could not believe we had found it because I had given up hope. It's a horrible feeling losing anything, especially when it's something so expensive and with so much sentimentality attached to it.
"I was just so relieved and happy to find it."
Mrs Stevenson, who runs the Glasgow with Kids blog about fun things to do with children, estimates they searched through around three quarters of the straw pit before finding the missing ring.
She praised staff for helping her get it back, describing them as "absolutely amazing".
She said: "They could not have done more to help. They were fantastic."
Briarlands Farm offers a range of outdoor activities such as sand pits, climbing frames and a tyre maze.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here