THEY say the best way to find something is to stop looking for it.

The advice has proved successful for one historian who had lost a cannonball dating back to the era of Nelson and Napoleon.

Arthur Lloyd feared he had lost a five-pound shot after returning with it from St Barbe Museum in Lymington.

In fact, the 87-year-old had taken the weighty lump back indoors but forgotten to note exactly where he had left it.

The president of Lymington Historical Society only stumbled on it while searching for something else entirely, a map of Hengistbury Head.

What the retired teacher really found remarkable was that his search, on Battle of Trafalgar Day, also turned up a newspaper cutting reporting on the death of Nelson in the key historical event.

He said: "It was an extraordinary coincidence to find both the cannonball and the cutting about Nelson's death on Battle of Trafalgar Day."

"I must have brought it back in from the car but I don't remember doing it. I ought to have written it in my diary."

Mr Lloyd, of Barton Drive, Barton on Sea, said the cannonball was originally found by three former pupils, including one called Martyn Meaker, in the 1950s.

The discovery prompted him to visit the Perkins family who were once owners of both the Southampton and Bournemouth Daily Echos, to consult a census they owned.

The records helped him link-up with another historical artefact-collecting former pupil, James Joyce. Mr Joyce is due to step down as chairman of the Lymington Historical Society at the end of this month.

It was discovered that the cannonball was originally used at a training ground in Shirley Holmes in the early 1800s.