Treasure hunts have excited people's imagination for hundreds of years both in real life and in books such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Kit Williams, a modern writer, had the idea of combining the real excitement of a treasure hunt with clues found in a book when he wrote a children's story, Masquerade, in 1979. The book was about a hare, and a month before it came out Williams buried a gold hare in a park in Bedfordshire. The book contained a large number of clues to help readers find the hare, but Williams put in a lot of “red herrings”, or false clues, to mislead them.
数百年来，无论是在现实生活中还是在罗伯特·路易斯·史蒂文森的《金银岛》一书中，寻宝活动都激发了人们的想象力。1979年，现代作家基特·威廉姆斯在写一本儿童故事书《化装舞会》时有了将寻宝的真正刺激和书中的线索结合起来的想法。这本书关于一只野兔，出版前一个月威廉姆斯在贝德福德郡的一个公园里埋了一只金兔。书中包含了帮助读者找到金兔的大量线索，但威廉姆斯加入了许多“红鲱鱼”（烟雾弹）或虚假线索，来误导他们。

Ken Roberts, the man who found the hare, had been looking for it for nearly two years. Although he had been searching in the wrong area most of the time, he found it by logic, not by luck. His Success came from the fact that he had gained an important clue at the start. He had realized that the words:“One of Six to Eight” under the first picture in the book connected the hare in some way to Katherine of Aragon, the first of Henry VIII's six wives. Even here, however, Williams had succeeded in misleading him. Ken knew that Katherine of Aragon had died at Kimbolton in Cambridgeshire in 1536 and thought that Williams had buricd the hare there. He had been digging there for over a year before a new idea occurred to him. He found out that Kit Williams had spent his childhood near Ampthill, in Bcdfordshire, and thought that he must have buried the hare in a place he knew well, but he still could not see the connection with Katherine of Aragon, until one day he came across two stone crosses in Ampthill Park and learnt that they had been built in her honor in 1773.
金兔的发现者肯·罗伯茨已经找了将近两年。尽管他大部分时间找寻的思路都是错的，但他还是按逻辑，而不是靠运气找到了金兔。他的成功来自于一开始就获得的一条重要线索，他意识到书中第一幅图片下的“六至八中的一个”这几个字将金兔与亨利八世六位妻子中的第一位阿拉贡的凯瑟琳产生了某种联系。然而，即使在这里，威廉姆斯也成功地误导了他。肯知道阿拉贡的凯瑟琳于1536年死于剑桥郡的金博尔顿，于是认为威廉姆斯把金兔埋在了那里。他一直在那里挖了一年多，突然有了一个新的想法。他发现基特·威廉姆斯的童年是在贝德福德郡的安普蒂尔附近度过的，于是认为他一定把兔子埋在了一个他熟悉的地方，但他仍然不明白与阿拉贡的凯瑟琳之间的联系，直到有一天他路过安普蒂尔公园的两个石制十字架时，他了解到这是在1773年为纪念她而建造的。

Even then his search had not come to an end. It was only after he had spent several nights digging around the cross that he: decided to write to Kit Williams to find out if he was wasting his time there. Williams encouraged him to continue, and on February 24th 1982, he found the treasure. It was worth 3000 in the beginning, but the excitement it had caused since its burial made it much more valuable.
即便如此，他的搜寻还是没有结果。他花了几个晚上在十字架周围挖掘之后，他才决定写信给基特·威廉姆斯，问问他在那里挖是否是浪费时间。威廉姆斯鼓励他继续，1982年2月24日，他找到了金兔。金兔一开始价值3000英镑，但自从它被埋葬后引发轰动，它就变得更值钱了。