A Chesterfield schoolboy has appealed to the community for help to identify an unusual object he fished from the River Rother last week.

Jacob Davis,12, and his brother Jenson were walking home from Outwood Academy Hasland Hall on Friday, March 14, when something caught eye on the riverbank along the Spital Trail near Clayton Street.

Mum Maire Cantrill said: “They walk that way every day and usually stop around the river. Jacob likes to pick things up and bring them home if he thinks they’re interesting, whether or not anyone thinks the same.

“They’re boys, aren’t they. I emptied his pockets for treasures the other day and found a block of wood and half a fork. Every day there’s something new.

The horn-like object was found on the banks of the River Rother. (Photo: Contributed)

placeholder image — The horn-like object was found on the banks of the River Rother. (Photo: Contributed)

“When I came home to this on the kitchen table it was quite a surprise and he was really excited. He said, ‘Come and look what I’ve got.’ I thought it might be an award from school or something.”

Instead, Maire was presented with what looked like an animal horn more than 30 centimetres long, and heavy but largely hollow.

She said: “I wasn’t a big fan of it. It made me feel funny, especially when I found he’d tried to rinse it in the sink and there was mud everywhere.”

But the object was intriguing enough to the whole family that Maire turned to the Chesterfield Community Network on Facebook to try and work out how and why it came to be in the river.

Jacob Davis regularly hunts for unlikely treasures on his way home from school. (Photo: Contributed)

She said: “One woman said it was a horn core – the inside which is discarded when someone takes the horn off an animal – but I don’t know why it would be there.

“There was the old tannery on Clayton Street I remember from when I was a kid, but it still looks to be too big to come from a cow and it seems to be fossilised so it can’t be that recent.”

One member of the Facebook group pointed out the similarity to a 6,000-year-old bison horn found by teenager in East Sussex in 2017, while another half-jokingly suggested it came from a mammoth.

Maire said: “People have said we should contact an archaeologist but I’ve been too busy with work so far and Chesterfield museum is closed at the moment.

“I don’t know what we’ll do with it. We’ll keep looking into it. We’d like to find out what it is, even if it’s not that old. Jacob’s learned a lot already. If anyone has any better explanations it would be lovely to hear them.”

To join the conversation, go to https://tinyurl.com/5d2uzta3.