Kit Williams

Kit Williams is the author of Masquerade, a pictorial story book which contained clues to the find a genuine valuable golden hare buried by Williams, and witnessed by Bamber Gascoigne, "somewhere in Britain".

Kit Williams said:

"If I was to spend two years on the 16 paintings for Masquerade I wanted them to mean something. I recalled how, as a child, I had come across 'treasure hunts' in which the puzzles were not exciting nor the treasure worth finding. So I decided to make a real treasure, of gold, bury it in the ground and paint real puzzles to lead people to it. The key was to be Catherine of Aragon's cross at Ampthill, near Bedford, casting a shadow like the pointer of a sundial."

When the book was published in 1979 the world went crazy, selling hundreds of thousands of copies world wide, obviously many in the UK, but also in Australia, South Africa, Germany, Japan, France and the USA to name but a few.

The treasure was found about two years after the book was published.