Pantastic! Scottish gold mine ‘is worth £150m’
SCOTLAND’S hills have far more gold and silver in them than previously thought, with a whopping £147million-worth waiting to be unearthed.
Earlier tests had suggested there were enough precious metals in the Argyll area to net the firm which owns them £101million in profits.
However, that figure has been revised upwards following a new investigation.
Owner Scotgold Resources said it is encouraged by tests of soil samples from the Inverchorachan area of Glen Fyne, near the village of Cairndow, Argyll. It described the results as ‘exciting, new and potentially significant’.
The samples from Inverchorachan are said to be more promising than previous tests for the firm’s existing mine at Cononish, near Tyndrum.
Scotgold said there could be three times more gold, and nearly twice as much silver.
It is not yet clear how extensive the deposits of precious metals could be.
However. sampling of stream sediments showed gold could be present in an area 1.9 miles long.
The Inverchorachan area is linked through the ‘Tyndrum fault’ to the Cononish mine. Both areas are part of a much larger Scotgold exploration project known as Grampian.
The start of commercial production at Cononish, 12 years after Scotgold’s work on prospecting began there, has been delayed from December to February next year due to the late delivery of equipment.
However, with gold prices higher than previously forecast, the firm is now assuming a market value of £1,200 per ounce for gold.
That does not take into account a premium on Scottish gold, which it received for its first, small-scale batch. The company has now told investors it could see returns of £147million over the lifetime of the Cononish mine. Scotgold’s chief executive, Richard Gray, said: ‘The combination of the gold price being in excess of £1,200 per ounce and the pipeline of projects that we anticipate will result from our Grampian exploration work bode well for the company’s longterm outlook.’
Last year, Scotgold’s plans for Cononish were approved by Loch Lomond & the Trossachs National Park’s planning authority after years of trying to design a commercially viable scheme that met strict planning criteria.
It has been 200 years since Scotland’s last gold rush, when the first nugget to be panned at Helmsdale, on the north-east coast, was turned into a priceless ring for the Duke of Sutherland.
However, there have been plenty of people lucky enough to find their own while panning for gold.
In July 2018, it emerged that a gold nugget worth at least £50,000 had been found in an undisclosed Scottish river.
‘Pipeline of projects’