South-west England

Six months ago a small town on the edge of Dartmoor with a population of 4000 launched an antiques trail to promote all 11 of its antiques and vintage shops. Now the Ashburton Antiques Trail includes both the expansion of one of its existing businesses into larger premises and the arrival of a 12th antiques shop.

A maquette for the statue of Mahatma Gandhi in London’s Tavistock Square – valued at £20,000 on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow – was the top lot in a sale of works from the Polish-born artist Fredda Brilliant (1903-99).

The series of Victorian carriage clocks by James McCabe – the son of a Belfast clockmaker of the same name who came to London in the 1770s and worked at the Royal Exchange from 1804 – are typically beautifully made with exemplary twin fusee striking movements.

By the 1980s, Thomas Mercer of St Albans had made almost a third of all chronometers in history – including that used by Ernest Shackleton to navigate his men to Elephant Island and eventual rescue during the Trans-Arctic Expedition of 1914.

The complex precision electromechanical pendulum clocks made by William Hamilton-Shortt, engineer for the London & South Western Railway, and Frank Hope Jones, horologist of the Synchronome Company, were the most accurate pendulum clocks ever commercially produced.

A mahogany longcase clock by Thomas Mudge (1715-94) is priced at £45,000 from Cheltenham dealer Tobias Birch.

Estimated at a token £100-200, a large twin fusee wall clock sold to an online bid of £2400 (plus premium) at Wessex Auction Rooms (17% buyer’s premium) in Chippenham.

Police have recovered a haul of stolen Asian artworks and returned them to the Museum of East Asian Art in Bath.

An acrylic on paper of Timanfaya, the only active volcano on the Canary Island of Lanzarote, by British artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004), is one of the highlights of the exhibition A Distant Isle.

Pamphlet in later royal binding offers thanksgiving for James I’s survival of Gunpowder Plot.

Part of the flying section of the most recent of the Military, Aviation & Transport History sales that are a regular feature of the calendar at Dominic Winter offered a collection of ephemera related to the earlier years of European civil aviation.

A watercolour of a thoroughbred racehorse auction appeared at Chorley’s (20% buyer’s premium) of Prinknash Abbey Park, Gloucestershire, on May 21 – 123 years to the day since it had itself last sold at auction.

A painting by the celebrated Chinese 20th century artist Zhang Da Qian (1899-1983) sold for £2.3m (plus premium) at Woolley & Wallis.

Two collections assembled since the late 1960s enthuse a fresh generation of buyers.

Two rackets rackets (no, you aren’t seeing double) are on offer at the exhibition '#7 – It’s a Magic Number', organised by Cotswolds dealers Manfred Schotten and Christopher Clarke Antiques.

Catalogued as ‘exceptional’, this farmhouse refectory table fulfilled the auctioneer’s adjective in more than one way at Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) sale in Dorchester on April 26.

Playing cards from two recent provincial sales are featured here – five examples from a 250-lot, single-owner collection offered in Gloucestershire, and a single pack from a Worcestershire sale.