Scotch Agate Pendant
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GUEST:
This was a gift from my mother-in-law. I know absolutely nothing about it. Neither did she. And she always said to us when she gave us gifts, "Everything is very valuable." And it got to be a family joke. So I'm here today to find out how valuable it actually is.
APPRAISER:
It's what we call Scotch agate jewelry. It also has kind of a nickname called pebble jewelry. This jewelry came about when Scotland opened up, when the railroad came from England into Scotland. Queen Victoria bought a castle there, Balmoral Castle. So with her, all the tourists came, and they needed jewelry like this to sell. What's interesting, though, is that this one's in yellow gold. So this probably had to be for somebody special, because 90% of it is silver. Now, pebble jewelry-- why do they call it pebble jewelry? Fishermen and people who were making this jewelry used to walk around Scotland and find little pebbles which were, for the most part, agates. And you'll see there's a striped agate. It looks like layers. There's a green stone-- that's bloodstone. You have some pearls on there. Now, the yellow stones, the one you see in the center, and the one at north, south, east and west, what it's called is citrine quartz.
GUEST:
Okay, okay.
APPRAISER:
And in the case of the center one, they put a piece of foil behind it to make it come to life a little bit more.
GUEST:
Oh, for heaven's sakes.
APPRAISER:
There's not a lot of great record keeping on the marks. Yours has "MC and Company," and there's a little cloverleaf in there. So clearly it's Scottish. We'll probably never figure out who actually manufactured it.
GUEST:
Who actually made it, yes.
APPRAISER:
Right, but I would say at auction today, $2,000 to $3,000.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
All right?
GUEST:
Okay. So my mother-in-law was right.
APPRAISER:
She was right.
GUEST:
She was right. It's very valuable.
Appraisal Details
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Value can change: The value of an item is dependent upon many things, including the condition of the object itself, trends in the market for that kind of object, and the location where the item will be sold. These are just some of the reasons why the answer to the question "What's it worth?" is so often "It depends."
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