Adam MacHale had always dreamt of finding treasure on his travels. But as the British holidaymaker scoured the shallows of a beach in Brittany, he didn’t expect to find more than a few pretty seashells.

Even when the greenish-coloured blade caught his eye in the sea off Petit Rohu beach he believed that, at best, he had found a clam shell.

It turned out to be a Stone Age axe - one of four he found in what French experts are hailing as an exceptional archaeological discovery.

Now Mr MacHale and Sonia Hoba, his French girlfriend, have been put forward for a prize from the Ministry of Culture for donating the Neolithic axes to the State.

Officials say they deserve the reward, which could be as much as €30,000 (£23,800), for resisting the temptation to keep the objects or to sell them to a private collector.

“Their attitude was that of good citizens,” said Emmanuelle Vigier, curator at Carnac Museum of Prehistory in southern Brittany, where the axes went on display this week.

Mr MacHale, 38, a telecommunications engineer from Malvern, Worces-tershire, noticed a pair of glistening objects sticking out of the mud at low tide while on holiday with his two children and Ms Hoba, 34, in Saint-Pierre-Quiberon in August 2007.

“I thought they were two edges of a clam shell and I was a bit nervous putting my hand down at first in case it snapped shut on me.”

The axes, made from jadeite, were buried in what was then marshland, about 6,500 years ago, according to French scientists. Researchers believe that the axes, made from a rock found in the Italian Alps, were owned by a Stone Age elite and had possibly been received as a form of diplomatic gift from leaders elsewhere.

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