THE bone-dry brushwood snapped and crackled underfoot as I careered through the foliage. Vicious young nettle leaves of deadly green searched for the vulnerable gap between socks and short trousers, that most tender area so beloved of those mean old stingers.

At the same time, willow fronds whipped across face and neck, while spiders' webs lashed my eyes like miniature whips.

A 10-year-old boy in a hurry, bound for nowhere in particular, just glad to be free of school and whatever chores had my name on them.

Suddenly, my foot connected with a hidden object in the greenery. I stumbled and fell. As if the stingers weren't enough. Regaining my balance, I determined to discover the nature of this well-concealed booby trap.

So I dropped to my haunches and started to investigate.

A few moments later, enough soil and vegetation had been scraped away to reveal a hexagonal - or octagonal, I can't remember - length of rusted metal, six inches of which protruded above ground.

It had proved a perfect snare for the unwary, embedded in the ground like King Arthur's sword in the stone.

My curiosity up and running, I could not resist further probings. Digging with the regulation sheath knife that many small boys carried in the 1950s, I dug away frantically in my quest to identify the mysterious Excalibur.

After five minutes, I had exposed what appeared to be a gun of some sort. Soon, this was confirmed, as a mud-caked breech mechanism was revealed.

It was indeed a gun. And now stabbing furiously away at the soil, I could not believe my luck.

A gun! No need to walk around with a Lone Star six-shooter anymore. I now had the next best thing to Buffalo Bill's trusty rifle. My mates would be even greener than those nasty young nettles when it came to envy.

Half an hour later, I was ensconced in my den at the back of the outhouses. With a bowl of water, scrubbing brush and wire wool, I set to work. Within minutes I had cleaned up a weapon of some sort - but what was it?

The barrel was the strange shape I have already described, the interior rifled, as one might expect. Heavy to handle, the aperture suggested a bullet calibre of probably no more than .22.

The stock was missing, and the damaged breech seemed to indicate that the gun had been deliberately broken. But as the questions queued in my mind, so did the mystery deepen.

To what period in history did this gun belong? Was it relatively new, or much older, perhaps dating back to the time when guns were first rifled in the middle of the 19th Century?

And what had it been doing hidden in the undergrowth underneath the willows bordering the brook? And who put it there - and when?

If the gun had indeed been deliberately broken - which is how it seemed - what was the reason behind it? Could it have been a weapon that had been used in a crime and disposed of in order to hide the evidence?

Or was it a sporting gun that had somehow been mislaid by its owner?

Questions, questions. My imagination was not so much fired, rather burning out of control, a raging inferno.

I decided to conceal the gun behind some loose bricks in the old pigsty, resolving to tell no one about my discovery, least of all a grown-up...

Thoughts of that old gun came rushing back once more as I took full advantage of a glorious April day the week before last and made my way to the banks of Worcestershire's beautiful River Teme to see if I could spot a few of my feathered friends.

I hadn't gone very far, when just outside the Worcester boundary, I heard a couple of shotgun blasts. I dismounted from my old bike and poked the binoculars through a gap in the hawthorn.

Near the far-side ditch of the adjoining ploughed field were two men, both with 12-bores. An agitated flock of cawing rooks wheeling about in the right-hand middle distance suggested they were the intended quarry.

Rook shooting still goes on in rural areas, although I don't have much time for such pursuits these days. Nevertheless, as a boy, many a May and June night was spent "bagging" dead rooks, blasted to eternity by the village men and youths.

I can well remember picking spent lead out of my hair, the result of shot dropping to the ground, its velocity spent.

At the conclusion of such unbridled slaughter, the birds would be piled up in the farmyard. Villagers would then appear with a sack to take their share.

What a difference a lifetime makes. I would have no stomach for such activities now, although I seem to recall that rook pie was a bit of a delicacy.

Apart from anything else, many farmers now realise that the rook is a valuable destroyer of insect pests - and if the cost is a few early wheat seedlings, then so be it.

So leave the little chap with the black trousers in peace, please.

But back to that old gun. Had I discovered it in more recent times, I would have been obliged to hand it over to the police as part of the current firearms amnesty that runs until the end of this month.

The same would presumably apply had I still been in possession of this strange weapon. But the fact is that all these years later, I cannot remember what became of it.

It's more than 40 years since I made that unusual discovery in the undergrowth on the riverbank. Yet I am no nearer to solving the mystery.

Heavens knows where it is now.

I have never once seen any weapon that remotely resembled that gun. Despite visiting countless museums, reading numerous history books and keeping my eyes peeled, I have not come across anything even vaguely similar.

The whole affair is as much a riddle now as it was all those years ago, when, as a

10-year-old village lad I toiled by candlelight in the gloom of my den at the top of the garden.

And after all those years, I can't even remember parting company with it - but that is exactly what happened. Perhaps it still remains entombed in that broken-down pigsty in north Warwickshire.

Or maybe I buried it as a treasure trove in a field, vowing to return - only to make the same mistake as pirate captain Blackbeard and fail to revisit the site of where the loot was hidden.

A thought occurs to me. Could it be that one fine day in the future, another village lad will stub his toe on a mystery object as he charges through the undergrowth?

And is it just possible he will rediscover that old gun, starting the process all over again?

Events would then have gone full circle. But stranger things do indeed happen.