Goldfinger by Alf Alderson

Most brides spend an age choosing their wedding ring but Daisy Thurkettle-Roper, a PhD student from Leeds, takes the biscuit – it took her almost twenty years to choose the ring for her recent wedding. To be fair, she did spend that time not just choosing the ring but panning for the gold from which it was made amongst the hills of Wales and Scotland from the tender age of four.

And in these credit crunching times finding your own British gold makes for a double-whammy (even if it does take decades) since Welsh gold is worth more than fifteen times the price of ‘regular’ gold such is its scarcity.

Bearing all this in mind it seemed crazy not to respond to a whole host of clichés and hit the road, go west and head for them thar hills in search of some Welsh gold of my own – what better way to beat the recession than discover your inner Goldfinger, as it were…?

In reality it was unlikely I’d make my fortune – my destination, Dolaucothi Gold Mines in the heart of the quiet, rolling green hills of Carmarthenshire has been mined intermittently since Roman times, and whilst no one knows exactly how much has been extracted from the mines its safe to say that King Midas wouldn’t be very impressed.

Although the Romans were the first to develop small scale gold mining here its thought that local people may have been extracting the yellow metal since Bronze Age times – and, incidentally, Welsh gold isn’t the bright, shiny yellow material you may expect. It’s known as ‘rose gold’ due to the subtle shade of pink it holds as a result of tiny amounts of copper being mixed in with it.

VICTORIAN VALUES

The Romans left a vast array of small open cast pits behind them, and it was in one of these that a second local ‘gold rush’ was inspired in Victorian times when the splendidly monikered Sir Warrington Smythe discovered traces of gold ore in 1844, although the main mining period was between 1933-38 when miners went as deep as 480-feet in their excavations.

But vast fortunes were never made and the mines closed for good in 1938 (even so the miners were earning up to ten times the local wages in the 30s), to be taken over by the National Trust in 1941 and eventually opened up as a tourist attraction.

You can take a guided tour of the Victorian mines, which is highly recommended, but like most visitors I was immediately drawn to the gold panning troughs, where the riches such as they are may be found. I had initially expected to be breaking my back beside some freezing cold mountain stream, but as site manager Steve Marks explained, I’d need a licence from the Crown to do that legally.

Yes, in Britain you have to have permission from Her Majesty to go and sniff around for Welsh gold, even though she herself was presented with a kilogram of the stuff on her 60th birthday. Some people just want everything, hey…?

Such permission isn’t required at Dolaucothi, so Steve set about showing me the basics of gold panning and, most importantly, how to spot flakes of the stuff in my pan. The sediment in which the tiny flakes of gold may be found is taken from the clear waters of the nearby River Cothi and placed in a couple of user friendly troughs which apart from anything else reduces the back bending, always a good thing (I met an American gold panner in Idaho some years ago who informed me that bad backs were par for the course with hardened gold panners).

HEAVY METAL

“The trick is to dig up the sediment at the side and towards the end of the trough,” advised Steve. “That’s where the heavier material ends up, and since gold is a heavy metal that’s where you’re more likely to find it”.

“Hey, you didn’t tell us that!” exclaimed a fellow panner who was listening in, at which there followed an unseemly scurry towards the prime spots. Steve then showed me how to swill the pan around in the water so the bigger and lighter material dropped over the side and heavier, finer sediment became caught in small ridges built into the pan. You then let this sediment flow back into the bottom of the pan and, gimlet eyed, check it out for tiny flecks of gold.

And tiny they will be. “About the size of dandruff” said the guy beside me. Nice. And anything that glisters alluringly is actually far more likely to be ‘fool’s gold’ – iron pyrite – than the real thing. That said, one lady had found a few flecks which had the characteristic pink tinge of Welsh gold, and she also had the ideal tool for extracting them – fingernails that were long and immaculately manicured (up until now) on the ends of which she could trap wayward flakes of gold.

“Real gold panners use a pipette,” said Steve as I struggled to catch a promising looking flake with clumsy fingers. Even with the price of Welsh gold (around $10,000 an ounce at the time of writing) this was not going to make me rich, but once seen the lure of a gold flake becomes easy to understand.

Standing beside me was twenty-something Kate from London who had been panning for about half-an-hour and said she was already finding it addictive, although she didn’t think she’d have the patience to stick at it for long enough to gather sufficient gold to make a ring.

But that’s not really the point of chasing after some of the world’s rarest gold. You won’t find a prettier setting in which to spend an afternoon, gold panning is surprisingly sociable – well, what else is there to do but chat to your fellow treasure hunters as you pan away – and even if you only find a few flakes it’s still a talking point when you get back home.

After all, not that many people other than the Queen can display native Welsh gold on their mantelpiece…