Mum Monica Kiss was given a fright when she found her son Sebastian playing with an old ornamental hand grenade in her garden in Burton, near Chippenham.

The adventurous three-year-old had picked up the wartime weapon after his father Greg Clark unearthed it in their garden last week.

Mr Clark, a farmer, said: “I was digging down at the bottom of the garden when I found it and I thought ‘ooh, this looks like a bomb’.

“Obviously it’s not what you expect when you’re digging in your garden but I wasn’t particularly worried.”

However, Miss Kiss was very scared, particularly when Sebastian got his hands on it and was playing with it.

“He came running up to me saying ‘Mummy look what I’ve got, it’s a bomb,’” she said.

“I had kept pushing Greg to ring the police all week but we knew we would have to leave the house and we didn’t know for how long.”

Police officers from Chippenham police station were called to the home at 9am on Tuesday and a team of Army bomb disposal officers arrived shortly afterwards to examine the grenade while the family was evacuated.

Mr Clark said: “We knew we would have to be evacuated, fortunately it was only us rather than any of our neighbours who had to vacate the premises.”

Miss Kiss added: “It has been taken away now, but we don’t know whether it was from the First World War or the Second.”

It was confirmed that the device was incapable of exploding and the family were able to return home within a few hours.

PC Paul Mcquillan from Chippenham police, who attended the scene, said: “We were called to the scene on Tuesday morning and we secured the area before calling in the bomb disposal unit.

“It was established that the object had already been deactivated and was an old ornamental grenade – the type that people display on their mantelpiece