There’s gold in them thar Irish hills!
As gold fever takes hold here again, one writer traces our ancient love of bling
CHARLES Stewart Parnell’s widow once recalled how her husband spent five years working on various chunks of quartz ‘till he had extracted sufficient gold to line my wedding ring, even though his hope of getting enough for the whole ring was not fulfilled’. The quartz had been scooped out of various streams on the Parnell estate of Avondale in the Wicklow Mountains, which, as Parnell knew well, is a gold-bearing region.
The notion that the people of Ireland are sitting on a goldmine acquired a deeper resonance with the recent announcement by the Dublin-based gold prospecting firm of Conroy Gold and Natural Resources that it had located an ‘extensive gold zone’ 30 metres below the Tullybuck mine at Clontibret, Co. Monaghan.
This coincides with an ongoing protest against an underground goldmine in the Sperrins Mountains of Co. Tyrone, and recent news that an Australian prospecting firm is to start searching Slieve Gallion for gold.
We will have to wait and see just how much gold is in them hills, but history suggests there could be plenty.
Ireland’s rapport with gold began in about 2500BC when the Bell-Beaker people arrived in from Europe, heralding the so-called Bronze Age. Turning their back on the culture that gave rise to passage graves, they focused on metallurgy and established extensive copper mines at places such as Ross Island in Co. Kerry.
THE Beakers also had an intricate understanding of gold-work. Although not a particularly taxing process, they had enough experience to know how to identify the ore to begin with. They also had the innovative techniques necessary to recover the gold and convert it into desirable objects.
The first gold objects found in Ireland were made in about 2200BC, with gold lunulae (a decorated necklace or collar shaped like a crescent moon) and sundiscs emerging as the must-have trinkets of the late third millennium BC. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, an American order, claim descent from the Order of the Golden Collar, founded by one of the Milesian Kings of Ireland; each knight of the order is said to have worn ‘a collar of gold’.
Gold has certainly been an obsession of the Irish elite for a very long time. More Bronze Age gold hoards have been found in Ireland than anywhere else. Of more than 100 gold lunulae found in western Europe, at least 80 were discovered in Ireland. Consequently, the National Museum of Ireland’s collection of Bronze Age gold-work is one of the largest in the world.
The source of all this gold is something of an enigma.
Some believe it came from the rugged slopes of Croagh Patrick, while others hold that it was panned from the gravelly beds of the rivers that flow off the igneous rocks of the Sperrins, the Mountains of Mourne and the Wicklow Mountains.
In the 12th-century Book Of Leinster, the men of Leinster were described as ‘Lagenians of the Gold’, on account of all the gold in their kingdom. Gold has also been found near Quigley’s Point and elsewhere on the Inishowen peninsula of Co. Donegal.
A recent geochemical study by Bristol University has controversially proposed that the gold used to make all this early Bronze Age bling actually came from Cornwall rather than Ireland. This suggests Ireland was, initially, a mere market for products mined and finished in Cornwall.
The 11th-century Lebor Gabála Érenn states that the first gold came to Ireland with a fellow called Biobhal (Bibal), who arrived from the Balkans in the late third millennium BC.
Curiously, the earliest evidence for human-worked gold is found in the Balkans.
The Fir Bolg are likewise said to have sold bags of clay to the Greeks in return for gold and silver.
The annals propose that the first Irish gold mine was opened during the reign of King Tigernmas, a contemporary of King Solomon of the Bible. It apparently stood near the banks of the Liffey, and was managed by Luchadán of Cualane, Co. Wicklow.
Tigernmas’s rule coincided with the late Bronze Age, by which time Ireland had become a European hub for gold working. New techniques for twisting bars or strips of gold saw a dramatic increase in both the quality and quantity of gold objects in Ireland. Objects made of Irish gold have reputedly been found as far away as Egypt.
THE Late Bronze Age also saw a craze for elaborately decorated torcs, as well as solid bracelets, dress-fasteners, large sheet gold collars and delicate ear-spools. Men had swords with golden hilts; their chariots were inlaid with gold.
Some furniture in the palace at Tara was said to be pure gold. Crowns of gold were also worn by Irish monarchs and provincial kings alike.
In 1854 railroad workers in Co. Clare unearthed what remains the largest gold hoard found outside the eastern Mediterranean. Comprising of 146 objects – collars, neck-rings, bracelets – it was hidden near the hillfort of Mooghaun, a ritual centre of considerable importance in the Late Bronze Age.
Some gold-work was truly exceptional. A gold lock-ring hair found at Gorteenreagh, also in Co. Clare, was ‘so perfectly and intricately fashioned that modern jewellers are convinced it would be almost impossible to copy’. It features ‘tiny concentric lines... made up of perfectly laid wires a mere third of a millimetre wide’.
The Christian church made much use of Irish gold in its chalices, crosses, plate and altar bells. The shrine used to house St Patrick’s Bell is reckoned to be made of Sperrins gold, while the Cross of Cong, crafted in Roscommon, also glimmered with gold.
Not surprisingly, the talk of all this gold reached the ears of Viking chieftains. Axes were sharpened, alcoholic beverage consumed, thunderous gods invoked. One can but guess how much of Ireland’s ancient gold was nabbed in the ensuing Viking raids, or carefully hidden here in Ireland, never to be seen again. Or indeed, how much was melted down and sold on by the less scrupulous goldsmiths and jewellers who predominated in Skinner Row and Crompton Court by Dublin Castle during the 18th and early 19th century.
The presence of gold is also suggested by place names such as Glenanore (Glen of the Gold) and Coomanore (Hollow of the Gold), near Bantry in Co. Cork, as well as Slieve Anore (Mountain of the Gold), near Feakle, Co. Clare, and Tullynore (Little Hill of the Gold) in Co. Down. The Spaniards who briefly occupied Smerwick Harbour in Co. Kerry in Tudor times called it Fort de l’Or after all the gold pieces found locally.
It was assumed that Ireland’s gold sources had long been exhausted, but a 2016 Geological Survey of Ireland used new technology to deduce that the State’s rivers and streams contained considerably more gold, platinum and precious metals than previously thought, with the most notable levels to be found on the WicklowWexford border, north of the Sugar Loaf and in the region of Avoca, Co. Wicklow.
AVOCA was the scene for an extraordinary Gold Rush in 1795. According to Saunders’s News-Letter, this began with a family feud. The Rosels, who farmed the area, had been quietly finding and selling gold for over a decade. However, a particularly large find prompted a fallingout between two Rosel cousins. When one cousin beat up another, the latter spilled the beans, ‘and thus set thousands of the neighbourhood on the search, in consequence of which many thousand ounces of gold have been found within the last few weeks’. The newspaper added that ‘above 4,000 people’ had been out prospecting the previous Sunday.
A large 682 grams nugget of ‘pure virgin gold’ was found in Avoca. It remains the biggest gold nugget yet found in Britain or Ireland and was apparently melted down to make a snuffbox for King George III. Dubbed ‘Little Peru’, the Avoca Gold Rush petered out with the 1798 Rebellion. Nonetheless, by 1830 an estimated 7,000-9,000 ounces had been extracted from the Goldmines River. This is what inspired Parnell to launch his numerous prospecting operations.
The recent news from Clontibret, coupled with the 2016 survey, is likely to prompt a new gold rush in Ireland as more and more companies seek to exploit the alluvial deposits from Irish rivers and streams.
If you’re now feeling inspired to head out panning, be warned that all precious metals you find are the property of the State.
You are, however, if it’s any consolation, permitted to keep quantities weighing less than two grams – or up to 20 gold flakes.