South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
GOLD IN THEM THAR BRAES
With prices for commodity surging, amateur prospectors fan out over Scottish countryside
With prices for commodity surging, amateur prospectors fan out over Scottish countryside.
WANLOCKHEAD, Scotland— As a late afternoon mist rolled in over hills carpeted with purple heather, Alan Popovich stood knee-deep in a fastflowing river, weary but undaunted despite searching all day in thewater without success.
“I guarantee there is gold here,” Popovich said as he used a hand pump to siphon water and gravel froma ditch in the riverbed, sift it in a sluice, and then pan for ametal that has been sought in Scotland for more than 4,000 years.
A few minutes later, in a green pan tilted slightly to one side, a few shiny specks of gold glinted in the fading sunlight froma mix of drab fragments of rock. “There’s gold, you can see it, right there,” he exclaimed with a mixture of elation and relief.
In this beautiful and remote valley about an hour south of Glasgow, Scotland, a sprawling medley of tents, trailer vehicles and campfires is testament to a surge in interest in the age-old quest for gold.
Not only do many Britons have more free time because they are on furlough, but the coronavirus pandemic has also made outdoor pastimes more attractive.
At the same time, the price of gold has surged close to $2,000 an ounce, and interest in it has also been propelled by the news that Scotland’s first commercial gold mine plans to start production inNovember.
“I never thought in a million years Iwould be in a river in Scotland panning for gold,” said Popovich, 52, whoworks for a pharmaceutical distribution company. He is originally from Detroit but has lived for 19 years in Scotland.
But nowon furlough and with time on his hands, it seemed the obvious thing to do.
“What else amI going to do? Go to the pub? I don’t think so. I don’t evenwant to go to a restaurant because ofCOVID,” he said, as he reflected on howhe came to pitch a small tent in a stretch of countryside where getting a cellphone signal requires climbing to the top of a hill.
Along the riverbank, SuzieMcGraw, who is from Glasgowand who has been a regular visitor to the area since childhood, said she had never seen as many people there as she had this year. Sitting next to her around a campfire, Mat White, fromLeeds in England, said 33 people had joined a Facebook page about gold panning in one evening.
“There’s a gold rush,” he said. “It’s crazy.”
If so, itwouldn’t be the first. Scotland experienced at least two documented 19th-century gold rushes after news of discoveries in California caused a global sensation. But rather than riches, those bursts of interest mostly delivered disappointment.
One, the Sutherland rush
in 1868 and 1869 in the Scottish Highlands, yielded modest quantities of gold. But during a stampede to Kinnesswood, in eastern Scotland, fromMay to July
1852, around 2,000 people hoping to find a life-changing fortune discovered only “fool’s gold”— valueless iron pyrites.
Nobody in the hills near Wanlockhead is expecting to get rich, however. While
1 gramof gold isworth around 50 pounds, or about
$65, thatwould be a good find for a day. The ambition of most is to collect enough tiny fragments— or “pickers,” in panning jargon— to create a ring for a loved one.
Serious money maywell be made around 100 miles to the north, near the village of Tyndrum, where there really is gold in the
imposing hills— or braes, as they are called in Scottish. The metal comes from theDalradian rock formation that runs east from Scandinavia beneath Scotland andNorthern Ireland and on toNewfoundland.
“People have been out panning in the streams and burns and glens for centuries, and there have always been nuggets found, and every year or two, someone pops up with a massive nugget of gold,” said RichardGray, chief executive of Scotgold Resources, which is developing the Cononish mine near Tyndrum. “But it’s down to the likes of us to get this particular deposit well defined.”
Although by international standards this is a tiny mine, Gray, who has worked in much bigger ventures around theworld, still thinks he has, literally, struck gold. He said his aim is to produce small quantities— 12,000 ounces a year initially, then double that— but of a very high grade. And because it is Scottish, and so in short supply, it sells at a premium.
“We are a niche player, andwe are going to make very good money out of it,” he said, adding that, after he produced a small quantity as a prototype in 2016, jewelers lined up to take more.
To reach the mine, visitors have to dodge grazing cattle and navigate a narrowroad that cuts through an imposing glen skirting a lively river. A processing facility is being built near a tunnel that has been drilled and blasted almost 2,300 feet into the hillside.
The mine manager, Marshall Badza, who has worked on many bigger mines, including in his native Zimbabwe, leads the way through the mine, wading through muddy puddles, the pitch dark illuminated by torches and the lights of mine vehicles ferrying rock to the exit.
The mine, which is in a national park, won approval only after a tussle with environmental groups. The upshot is that production of gold here will not involve cyanide, which is widely used elsewhere in processing but raises environmental concerns.
Instead, the gold will be extracted through a technology known as gravity separation, but this technique willwork on only around one-quarter of the gold mined fromCononish, while the rest will be processed outside Scotland.
After theirwork is done, the engineers must leave the national park in pretty much the same environmental condition in which they found it. Badza pointed his torch to an area that will eventually be turned into a bat colony.
“It’s not just a gold project. It is breaking ground in manyways. It’s actually making history,” he said. “If we don’t get it right, it could be the end of gold mining in Scotland, the first and last commercial gold mine.”
The hope, however, is that it will instead prompt other mining ventures, bolstering the economy.