Rare fairy photographs discovered in an Okehampton farmhouse have gone under the hammer.

A complete set of the Cottingley Fairies images lay unrecognised in a Devon farmhouse drawer for almost a hundred years and sold at an auction in Lincolnshire on Tuesday (September 2).

The buyer, a collector from Lancashire, purchased the lot online for £3,1000 and immediately jumped into her car to drive the four hour round trip to collect the pictures.

The rare fairy photographs were entered into the sale by members of the Devon family who only realised how rare they were when they saw Cottingley Fairy memorabilia featured on the BBC Antiques Roadshow series.

They later also read about the result achieved when two Cottingley photographs were auctioned at John Taylors sales room in Louth.

The hoax of the Cottingley Fairies began in 1917 when sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright took two photographs of her cousin Frances Griffiths with the ‘fairies’ that they said lived around the beck at the bottom of their garden in the village of Cottingley in West Yorkshire.

Auctioneer at John Taylors, James Laverack, explained: “When the news began to spread photographic experts were asked to examine the glass plate negatives. Their verdict was that there was no evidence of tampering. Some of them went even further and said the pictures were not fakes.

“The story went global when Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about the Cottingley Fairies in The Strand Magazine.”

Famous spiritualist Edward Gardner arranged for the girls to take three more photographs with cameras he supplied, and he had high quality prints of all the photographs hand printed.

James added: “He used them for lectures around the country and sold some sets at the events. It was two of those prints that went under the hammer in our auction last month, prints that once belonged to Frances Griffiths, the girl who appears in the photographs with the fairies."

The Okehampton set is a complete set that is believed to have been bought by the vendor's grandmother, Bideford farmer's daughter Clare Risdon, or her sister Betty, at an Edward Gardner spiritualist lecture. The photographs cost fifteen shillings, a mere 75 pence, and include the mysterious fifth and final shot from the schoolgirls.

James added: "The set does include the intriguing fifth and final photograph, the one that Francis Griffiths continued to believe showed real fairies even after the girls admitted they had faked the rest.

“Both girls claimed to have taken that photograph; claims which have led to photography experts speculating that they achieved an accidental double exposure, creating the strange ghostly image.”

The prints were passed down the generations in the family with no knowledge of their value or rarity. James said: ”It was only when Frances Griffith's daughter appeared on an episode of the Antiques Roadshow in 2009 that they realised they had a full set of Cottingley Fairy photographs sitting in their bureau drawer.

“And it was even later that they realised these Gardner high quality prints are actually pretty rare."