In 1927, a subterranean chamber in France was discovered, accidentally, by a cow. Full of mysterious artefacts, some of them Neolithic, the find was an enigma. Was it a mediæval magician’s store, a Templar treasure house or something even more mysterious? Patricia and Lionel Fanthorpe revisit one of their earliest investigations.

Seventeen-year-old Emile Fradin was helping his grandfather on their family farm at Glozel, near Vichy in the heart of central France, when they stumbled – quite literally – across one of the most bitterly controversial mysteries of the century. It was 1 March 1924 when one of their grazing cattle fell suddenly through the apparently smooth and stable surface of the meadow.