It's amazing what you can find in a ladies handbag!

I live in Sidcup, enjoy watercolour painting and am always looking for new places to paint. A number of years ago whilst on a summer break in Herefordshire visiting my parents who had retired to the picturesque village of Weobley, my husband and I decided to drive around an area on the Welsh borders in the Black Hills. After some hours, we were thinking of returning to my parent’s house. With one last look on the map, I picked out a place high up in the hills near Dorstone, which showed a National Trust site known as King Arthur’s Stone. This is a stone age burial chamber set high on a hill overlooking the Wye valley and Hay On Wye. We drove up a steep track and reached the top as another car passed us on its way down. We parked our car in a tiny clearing in front of the stone mound and looked around. We were the only people there on this late summer afternoon. I got out of the car and stepped onto a hard object which was in the long grass. When I looked down I discovered it was a ladies handbag which was in the style of a saddle bag. I picked it up out of the grass and held it for a few minutes not wanting to open it, thinking that the owner might come back any minute. But no one came. We both decided that it would be a good idea to look inside the bag and then try to find a way to return it to the owner. I opened the bag and inside were keys, credit cards, an address book and a diary. This looked promising but nothing prepared us for what happened next. I looked at the names on the credit cards and thought they seemed familiar. I then looked in the address book and found what I thought was their address: again I recognised this. My stomach had butterflies and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I knew this person! Connecting the names on the credit card to the place where they lived, I realised that the bag belonged to the wife of a childhood friend of mine who I hadn’t seen for over 20 years. Just to double check, I looked in the diary and found that the family had been visiting Hay On Wye on their holiday which was over 350 miles away from their home in Sevenoaks, Kent! We both looked at each other and shared a surreal moment. As soon as we got back to my parent’s house we tried to phone the owner’s number (this was before we had a mobile phone) but they were obviously still travelling back to their house in Sevenoaks so we left a message. After a few days, we made contact with an equally incredulous family who could not believe what had happened as they only went to the same site as an afterthought! It’s still an amazing story to tell to others after all these years and we would like to know what the odds are of this ever happening again?