Join Valentine's treasure hunt to find £1,000 ring

If you fancy your chances as a treasure hunter, you could win a £1,000 antique engagement ring. A treasure hunt hits central London on Saturday 6 February, and participants will have to solve the clues in order to track the ring down.

The prize is an antique Art Deco engagement ring - with diamonds set in white gold. The 200-year-old ring has been valued at £1,000, so it could help make the expensive business of proposing far less burdensome. You could put the money you save towards the wedding - or something more lasting.

The hunt

The event is being held by love antiques.com, which has written ten cryptic clues in rhyming couplets in order to guide people around London statues and onto the prize.

To take part you will have to submit your email address to the treasure hunt website before midnight this Friday. At 10am on Saturday, everyone taking part will be emailed the location of the first statue.

Once you have solved the clue and raced to the statue, you need to send a photo of yourself in front of it (either by text or email) and you'll receive the next clue within 10 minutes (or get a message saying you're in the wrong place!).

If you are the first person to the final statue, once you have sent your selfie, a member of the treasure hunt team will find you at the statue and hand over your prize. It has suggested that contestants start researching London statues as soon as possible.

Treasure hunts

This follows a long tradition of real-life treasure hunts as publicity stunts. Back in December last year, to promote their latest album, London band Moones decided to spend their £4,000 music video budget on a treasure hunt instead. They hid a secret code under a piece of chewing gum on a wall in London - and live-streamed a relatively close-up shot. Every time the video count doubled, the camera would zoom out a little to make locating the wall easier. The prize was claimed by 3pm - and an interview with the winner was live-streamed too.

In June 2014, a Californian millionaire hid envelopes stuffed with £100 in cash around Kensington Gardens in London and tweeted clues to help people find them. The winners were invited to tweet celebratory pictures of themselves.

In 2011 Jay-Z sent fans on a treasure hunt, to find all 320 pages of his autobiography, Decoded. They were hidden in locations related in some way to the text on each page - from the bottom of a swimming pool in Miami to cheeseburger wrappers in New York. The people who found the pages first, and checked them into a dedicated website, got the chance to win two tickets for every Zay-Z concert for life.

However, treasure hunts don't always go entirely according to plan. In 2007, Dr Pepper held a multi-city treasure hunt with a grand prize of $1 million. For the Boston part of the hunt, they decided to hide a gold coin in Granary Burial Ground - the cemetery where Samuel Adams and Paul Revere are buried. It didn't occur to the organisers what would happen if a hoard of treasure-hunters hit a cemetery - presumably armed with spades. Fortunately, Boston officials closed the cemetery and found the coin themselves.