SUNKEN TREASURE

One man’s compulsion for seeking out Scotland’s gold

LEON Kirk was born with gold fever. “It is the DNA,” he says. “Growing up the word ‘treasure’ blew me away. As a kid I was always looking for shiny stones. But once I saw gold everything else disappeared: it is the top of the pyramid.” Despite his early fascination, Kirk, 53, was a late starter in the gold panning world. “I was in my mid-thirties when I took it up,” he recalls. “I used to fly as a hobby and had my own microlight aircraft but I got bored and took a break.

“I had always wanted to find gold. I’m self-taught. In the 1990s when I started, there wasn’t the kind of information on the internet that there is now.

“There was no one doing courses and very little equipment for sale. I was scrambling about trying to build knowledge. There was only a small group of people who did gold panning. It is a bit of a secret society.”

Over the past two decades Kirk, who splits his time between Glasgow and Castle Douglas, has carved himself a reputation as one of Scotland’s most prolific gold panning experts.

He teaches gold panning courses privately and on behalf of the Museum of Lead Mining at Wanlockhead in Dumfries and Galloway as well as designing, manufacturing and selling specialist equipment. Next month Kirk will compete at the World Gold Panning Championships 2017 in Moffat.

Away from his all-consuming pastime, his day job is working in maintenance at Strathclyde University’s halls of residence in Glasgow. “I’m one of those people who won’t stop at climbing a hill: I have got to do Everest,” he laughs. “And that is exactly what I did with the hobby.”

All through his life he has had a magpielike fascination for things that sparkle or shine. Dumfries-born Kirk spent almost a decade of his childhood living in Swaziland – where his father worked in the paper industry – and would hunt for gemstones in the southern African rivers.