Unexploded artillery found underground at recent Open Championship site

That's not something you see every day.

An unexploded artillery shell was found at Royal Liverpool Golf Club, which hosted the 2023 Open Championship in Great Britain. Crews at the site found the shell while digging beneath the course.

Video shows a controlled explosion taking place to take care of the ordnance, and the site was deemed safe following the blast.

Brian Harman won the 151st Open at Royal Liverpool, which has hosted the Open 13 times. Six of those instances have been since World War II, when the site was used for war efforts. From the Royal Liverpool website:

"The first signs of war on the Royal Liverpool links were the arrival of a strange looking instrument, a predictor, said to be able to foretell the line of approach of hostile aircraft; certain elderly gentlemen beginning the task of digging trenches on various parts of the links, their leisurely and inexpert methods causing great amusement to the Royal Liverpool greenkeeper; a local contractor building a series of comic opera forts among the sand-hills; the dazzling beam of a searchlight, operated from a site near the Royal (17th) green, sweeping the night sky; the first German plane overhead; and the feeling that the long drawn suspense was over at last."

During the week of the Open Championship, 261,180 fans coursed the grounds at Royal Liverpool, but as photographs show, the artillery was buried beneath layers of sand and grass and was only found when digging multiple feet underground. But it was a stark reminder of what purpose the links served 80 years ago.

"Guarded by unoccupied and unusable forts, protected by live mines, wrapped in miles of rusting barbed wire, trampled on by the feet of many sheep, used as a training ground by regular troops and Home Guard, the Royal Liverpool links remained neglected and uncared for until the summer of 1944, when all fear of invasion having vanished, the Royal Engineers began to clear the mine fields," the Royal Liverpool website continues.