When metal detectorist Paul Adams stumbled on a hoard of gold coins he believed his luck was finally in.

In all the weeks he had spent carefully scanning fields with his metal detector he had never before found such a treasure.

With a little jig of delight and a cry of “Roman gold! Roman gold!” Mr Adams called over his detecting partner Andy Sampson to feast his eyes on the trove, worth what they estimated might be as much as £250,000.

Pretty soon they started planning how to spend the proceeds of their discovery.

But in what turned out to be a case of life imitating art imitating life, the 54 gold coins were nothing more than props left behind by a film crew making the BBC comedy series Detectorists, starring Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones as two hapless friends dedicated to the search for buried treasure.

During filming of a scene from the first episode of the last series, the replica coins were shown first being buried in a clay Roman pot before being brought to the surface by a tractor ploughing a field 2,000 years later.

Unfortunately for Mr Adams, 58, and Mr Samson, 54, when it came to clearing the set the production company left behind some of the coins, raising the pair’s hopes when they came across them a few weeks later.