In 1983, Cadbury buried 12 clue boxes for its Creme Egg hunt; one finder’s 22-carat egg later rose from £6,500 to £123,500 at auction

Long before treasure hunts moved onto smartphones, Britain had one that came wrapped in chocolate advertising. In the early 1980s, people armed with spades and a book of riddles were poking around historic sites and private land, hoping to dig up a gold egg. More than four decades later, one of those eggs is back in the headlines. A Dorset man dug it up and it sold at auction in 2018 for a hammer price of £6,500; in August 2026, it sold again for a hammer price of £123,500, Lincs Online reported.A book of riddles and twelve buried eggsTo promote its Creme Eggs, Cadbury came up with a treasure-hunt concept that saw Garrard & Co, crown jewellers to the British royal family for more than 160 years, craft 12 individual golden eggs, National Jeweler and JCK reported. The 12 perspex cases containing wooden boxes and letters were hidden at various undisclosed locations across the country. The treasure hunters had to solve the puzzles and conundrums found in the book titled Conundrum: The Cadbury’s Creme Egg Mystery, which was authored by Don Shaw and illustrated by Nick Price.The egg Clive Pinder dug up in Somerset As reported by the BBC, Clive Pinder, from Dorset, cracked the clues that led to Cricket St Thomas, Somerset, in 1983 and recovered the casket containing the egg known as Cuckoo Cuckoo. The egg is made of 22-carat gold with green and blue enamel. It depicts a cuckoo sitting in a tree, surrounded by seven human figures. Seven wheat sheaves are also embossed on its back, along with Garrard & Co.'s maker's mark and a London hallmark for 1983. Lincs Online said Cuckoo Cuckoo weighs about 253 g and stands 8 cm high. The treasure hunt became so disruptive that the Weekly Dispatch cancelled it after six weeks, following reports of roads being dug up, trees damaged and public spaces vandalised.How £6,500 became £123,500Pinder sold the egg at auction in 2018 for a hammer price of £6,500. Its buyer later put it up for sale again. On 1 August 2026, Batemans of Stamford, Lincolnshire, sold the egg for a hammer price of £123,500. Lincs Online reported that the egg had been estimated at £15,000 to £20,000, so the hammer price was more than six times the top estimate. It was nearly 19 times the hammer price of 2018, but one should note that hammer price and premium-inclusive totals are not equivalent figures.Greg Bateman, managing director of the auction house, told Lincs Online that the sale was absolutely incredible and that the conundrum eggs were a fascinating piece of British cultural history. The provenance of the item was a factor here as well because the lot had everything it needed: the green leather presentation box, the original perspex box which had been buried, the wooden conundrum casket, the original handwritten parchment letter and the 1983 version of the book.A market that keeps climbingCuckoo Cuckoo is not the first time a conundrum egg has shocked the market. A bigger thirteenth egg, given to a Cadbury retailer through a contest, instead of being discovered by the public in an egg hunt, was sold for £37,200 with buyer's premium in 2021, according to the Guernsey Press, compared to the £20,000 from the 2017 sale. Cadbury Creme Eggs are still sold each Easter, while the gold egg outlived the hunt in which it was hidden.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.