It was later found that Thompson had not solved the puzzle and had guessed the hare's location using insider knowledge obtained from a former acquaintance of Williams.

He sealed the hare inside a small ceramic casket, both to protect the prize from soil and to foil attempts to locate the treasure using a metal detector.

Williams announced publicly that his forthcoming book contained all clues necessary to identify the treasure's precise location in Britain to "within a few inches."

To ensure that readers from further afield had an equal chance of winning, Williams also announced that he would accept the first precisely correct answer sent to him by post.

[4] The book was reinvented and translated by Joan Arnold and Lilli Denon with the name Il tesoro di Masquerade (Emme Edizioni).

Real-life locations reproduced in the paintings were searched by treasure hunters, including Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire and Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire.

Barker and Rousseau seemed to have unearthed the prize themselves when digging at Ampthill, but had not noticed it inside its clay box; it appeared that Thomas had discovered it in the dirt piles they had left behind.

He summarised his experiences thus: Tens of thousands of letters from Masqueraders have convinced me that the human mind has an equal capacity for pattern-matching and self-deception.

The letters indicated by these lines can be made to form words, either by treating them as anagrams or by applying the sequence of animals and digits suggested by the Isaac Newton painting (pictured).

For example, in the painting depicting the Sun and the Moon dancing around the Earth, the hands of the two figures are clasped together, pointing at the date of the spring equinox.

The "...four men from twenty" refers to four fingers and toes out of twenty digits; "...the tallest and the fattest" relates to using the longest digits; "..the righteous follow the sinister" provides a clue to the decoding of the letter order (left (sinister) eyes through left finger and toe first, then the righteous (right) ones).

The clue featured a self portrait of Kit Williams surrounded by fourteen animals, the first letter of each making "Merry Christmas".

[1] The Sunday Times alleged that while living with Williams, Robertson had learned the approximate physical location of the hare, while remaining ignorant of the proper solution to the book's main puzzle.

"[8] Dugald Thompson founded a software company called Haresoft, and offered the jewel as a prize to a new contest which took the form of a computer game, Hareraiser.

Pimania (Automata UK, 1982) was solved in 1985, with the winners correctly deducing that the competition's £6,000 golden sundial would be located at Litlington White Horse in East Sussex, England.

Many later hunts make use of technologies that were unavailable when Masquerade was published, such as the web-based homage Menagerie, the CD-ROM based Treasure Quest,[16] and Text4Treasure, which uses SMS messaging.

Others, such as Army of Zero and West by Sea: A Treasure Hunt That Spans the Globe (Expeditionaire, 2016) follow Masquerade's use of physical media for the main puzzles, but provide additional clues online.