What lurks beneath: Treasures, shipwrecks and curios

In the receiver’s 2023 report the elephant tusk is listed as 3.5ft (1.1m) long and “blackened by mud”.

Mr Goodban was beachcombing in Sandwich Bay, Kent when he “just saw something poking out the mud”.

“I put my hand down… and I thought, ‘I think I know what this is’ and then the sand cracked in a big semi-circle and that’s when I realised I had an elephant tusk,” he said.

Mr Goodban said finding something that’s lain undiscovered for many years was “always a real thrill”.

“I was walking back to my car, had the tusk over my shoulder because of the curvature of the tusk, it sort of lends itself to being carried over the shoulder, and I… just thought to myself, 200 years ago there would have probably been an African porter walking out the interior with one of these on each shoulder, taking it down to the coast for export to England.”

Surprisingly Mr Goodban’s is not the only elephant tusk to have been found.

Another was found off Falmouth in 2019, 110m (361ft) underwater on a Royal African Company trader wreck.

The ship was believed to have been involved in the West Africa slave trade in the 1680s but sunk off Cornwall.