REDCAR mum Lynne Heraghty made a joke when she found an unusual metal object among the weeds of her back garden.

"Ooooh, I've found a bomb," she laughed, while tapping it with a trowel.

But, once she had knocked off the mud, Mrs Heraghty of Newmarket Road realised that she really had found a grenade.

"I had been digging up a concrete path in my back garden and was clearing away the rubble when I noticed this strange object," mother-of-two Mrs Heraghty said.

"I tapped it with my trowel, which makes me shudder to think. Then I realised it was a little grenade, although it was badly corroded. I used to work in a munitions factory so I saw what it was straight away," she said. "My children were playing up and down the street so soon everyone got to know about it."

The police were called shortly after 6pm on Sunday.

They took the grenade away and, in turn, called army bomb disposal experts who diffused it. It is thought the grenade was made in 1936 for the British Army.

Mrs Heraghty's garden backs on to former allotments which were bulldozed a number of years ago.

She believes the grenade may have been stored away in an old shed and was simply displaced.