Masquerade: The British Picture-Book Puzzle That Launched a Real-World Treasure Hunt

A Picture Book With a Real Treasure at the End

In 1979, British artist Kit Williams published Masquerade, a picture book with an extraordinary promise: its illustrations concealed the location of a real golden hare. Readers could enjoy the story at home, but solving its clues might lead them to a treasure buried somewhere in Britain. The book turned close looking into a nationwide hunt—and attracted puzzle solvers far beyond Britain.

Today, the hare has been found and the hunt is over. But Masquerade remains a fascinating example of how a puzzle can make the boundary between a story and the real world feel wonderfully thin.

The Story of Jack Hare

On the surface, Masquerade tells a fairy tale. The Moon asks Jack Hare to carry a precious gift to the Sun. Jack travels through a world of richly painted characters and landscapes, only to discover that he has lost what he was meant to deliver. The reader is invited to find it.

That invitation worked on two levels. Children could follow Jack’s adventure and search the pictures for details they had missed. Older readers could do the same—and wonder whether a curious gesture, an odd phrase or a letter around a painting’s border was part of a larger message. The pictures were not simply illustrations beside a puzzle. They were the puzzle.

The prize made the challenge tangible. Williams had created a jewel-studded golden hare and hidden it before the book appeared. A reader who worked out where Jack’s treasure had gone could, in principle, go and find a treasure of their own. It was an “armchair treasure hunt” with an outdoor ending: the searching began on the page, while the answer pointed to a place in the landscape.

How Did the Pictures Hide a Location?

The solution did not depend on spotting one tiny hare and reading a place name beside it. Solvers had to recognize a method that could be applied across the paintings. Lines drawn from figures’ eyes through particular fingers or toes pointed toward letters in the illustrated borders. Those letters produced words and phrases; arranged in order, they formed a riddle. The initial letters of its parts also spelled “CLOSE BY AMPTHILL.”

Ampthill is a town in Bedfordshire, England. The longer message supplied the next step through references to Catherine, a “long finger,” midday and an equinox. Together with other clues, these directed solvers toward a cross commemorating Catherine of Aragon in Ampthill Park. The intended hiding place was marked by the tip of the monument’s shadow at midday on an equinox. Williams had turned a stone landmark and sunlight into the final pieces of his puzzle.

An equinox occurs around March and September, when day and night are roughly equal in length. For the puzzle, the important idea was practical: the position of the Sun determines where a tall object casts its shadow. A place that looked like ordinary parkland became meaningful once readers knew which monument, which day and which part of the shadow mattered.

It was an ambitious chain of reasoning. A solver first had to notice a repeated feature in the art, then test whether it yielded readable language, then interpret that language as directions. Each stage offered a chance to go wrong—or the satisfying discovery that a strange detail was not strange at all.

Why the Hunt Captured So Many People

Masquerade gave readers several reasons to return to it. The paintings rewarded observation even if someone never solved a clue. The story gave the search an emotional shape: Jack had lost something, and the reader could help recover it. Meanwhile, the physical prize raised the stakes without requiring specialist equipment to begin. Anyone with the book could look, compare and make a theory.

Its format also encouraged collaboration. One person might notice a pattern in the borders while another recognized a historical reference or understood the shadow clue. Readers could disagree, revisit the evidence and improve their ideas—much as groups do in modern puzzle hunts and escape rooms. For another example of clues leading players from words and symbols into outdoor spaces, Puzzles Arcade explores geocaching’s worldwide puzzle hunts.

There is a delightful difficulty built into Masquerade: its pictures had to function as art and as instructions without announcing which was which. A figure pointing across a painting could feel like part of the scene until the reader realized that pointing itself might matter. That double purpose is what makes the book memorable even after its secret has been explained.

Who Found the Golden Hare?

The hare was unearthed at Ampthill Park in February 1982 by a man calling himself Ken Thomas. At first, his discovery appeared to bring the long hunt to a happy close. The story became more complicated when it emerged that Thomas—whose real name was Dugald Thompson—had not solved the book’s central picture puzzle in the intended way.

Around the same time, two teachers, Mike Barker and John Rousseau, had worked out the elaborate solution through the book’s clues. They reached the correct area but did not recover the hare before Thompson did. Later reporting linked Thompson’s search to information obtained through a connection with a former girlfriend of Williams. For readers who had spent years studying the paintings, the distinction between finding the prize and solving the puzzle mattered enormously. The Guardian’s account of the hare’s rediscovery recounts both the controversy and Williams’s later reunion with his creation.

The disappointing turn does not erase Barker and Rousseau’s achievement. They showed that the answer really could be reached by attending to the artwork and following its logic. Nor does it diminish the excitement of everyone who tried: the hunt had encouraged people to look more carefully, share ideas and treat a book as a place worth exploring.

The Place Behind the Puzzle

Ampthill Park is not an imaginary setting invented for Jack Hare. Its Catherine of Aragon memorial—often called Katherine’s Cross—is a real historic landmark. Ampthill Town Council’s account of the cross notes its connection to the golden hare and makes an important point for visitors: digging near the monument risks damaging historically valuable ground. The treasure was recovered decades ago, so there is nothing left there to unearth.

That leaves a gentler way to appreciate the ending. Readers can examine the solution, imagine the cross acting like a sundial, or visit the park to see how a real location became the answer to a painted riddle. The discovery is in understanding the connection, not disturbing the site.

What Masquerade Left Behind

The treasure hunt ended in 1982, but its central idea has proved remarkably durable: a printed object can invite people into a bigger world of shared investigation. Later hunts have used books, websites, images and physical locations to create that same moment when an ordinary-looking detail suddenly becomes a clue. Puzzles Arcade’s look at Cicada 3301’s internet puzzle hunt shows how different the tools can be while the pleasure of making connections remains familiar.

The hare itself was eventually sold, and Williams was reunited with it for a BBC documentary in 2009. Yet the object is only one part of Masquerade’s story. Its lasting gift is the invitation Williams placed in every painting: look again. A border may be a message; a gesture may be a direction; a fairy tale may contain a map. For any reader who has ever gone back to a page and noticed something new, that is a treasure worth keeping.