Handworked Antique Silver & Gold ring, English, probably crafted in the 1880s given the extraordinary craftsmanship of the silver-work. The times when a skilled bench worker would spend the hours and hours and hours required to handcraft in Silver a piece such as the above Handworked Antique were long gone over 100 years ago, were going, really, by the late 1800s; the Great War of 1914-1918 removed so many skilled artesans from the workforce that wages began to rise and seriously detailed silver-work became a thing of the past.
The above Handworked Antique Silver and Gold ring is in excellent condition. Two glass “gemstones” were missing from the very top of the setting when the ring was sourced in London just pre-COVID, but otherwise required no work. It probably had much the same sort of history as so many other such English antique items of jewellery: worn a lot but with reasonable care for years, put away in a box in a drawer, finally sold to a dealer as one item in an auction job-lot.
The two missing little glass “diamonds” were carefully replaced in Sydney with two small White Topaz gemstones. A very close look can discern the little White Topaz replacements in the top of the setting, clean-faced as opposed to the wear of most of the glass “diamonds” ( or “paste” as such glass pseudo-diamonds are called in the jewellery trade ).